


The Box

by aflyingcontradiction



Series: Encounters of a kind [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Action/Adventure, Disabled Character, Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Science Fiction, Some not overly graphic violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-11
Updated: 2018-06-11
Packaged: 2019-05-21 00:28:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14905068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aflyingcontradiction/pseuds/aflyingcontradiction
Summary: Twenty years have passed since the events of "The Orb" and Izzy is no longer a child of the slums, but a successful engineer researching extraterrestrial technology and thus no stranger to the odd and extraordinary. But the disappearance of her most dangerous project will test her limits and tear open old wounds.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story and its prequel were inspired by my friend Chris's as-yet-unpublished sci-fi tabletop RPG (to the point that it's basically Alternate Universe fanfiction thereof).
> 
> I would also like to thank my husband for beta-ing!

“Everyone! Settle down!” Izzy shouted over the din, feeling rather more like the teacher of some bizarre and raucous classroom than she would have liked.

The classroom ignored her

“Guys? GUYS! ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?” She banged her fist on the table a few times for emphasis.

One by one, people slowly started finding seats around the table, until Fasar and Drew finally noticed they were the only ones still shouting at each other with everyone else looking on. Undaunted and with exaggerated casualness, Fasar sat down, cleared their throat, steepled their claws, and looked at Izzy expectantly.

Izzy looked at her team and sighed: “So Dr. Courval wants a progress report on our key projects, which is why I called this meeting. I don’t like it either, but the faster we get this over with, the faster we can go back to doing useful things.”

The muttering around the table now sounded vaguely approving and some people even clapped once or twice.

Izzy looked at the screen displaying the minutes and wondered whether she ought to delete that last part before hitting ‘Submit’. But no, Lucas had to be well aware that the entirety of Xenoengineering Research hated meetings and a bit of gentle discouragement wouldn’t do him any lasting harm.

“Right,” said Izzy, scrolling through her notes and feeling incredibly awkward. More than an hour’s warning would have been nice! “Let’s start with E-54! What’s the current…”

She hadn’t even finished when the entire E-54 team started shouting, squeaking and growling across each other. The screen rapidly began to fill with “Incomprehensible. Incomprehensible.”

“GUYS!” Izzy hit the table with a bit more force than she had intended. “Ouch! Damn it!”

“You okay, Chief?” Eiska’s grumbly voice broke through the noise.

“I’d be just fine if you lot would talk one at a time! You’re ruining the minutes!”

Rather than having the intended effect, this caused a brief surge in discussion of parallel audio differentiation.

“Really? Oh, come on!” Izzy groaned.

Gradually, the overly excited engineers fell silent again.

“Alright, let’s start with…” Izzy looked around the room and finally picked someone at random, “Tom!”

“Erm, well, the hybrid engine should be good to go as soon as we get the fuel delivery from Docrilia!”

“Wait - didn’t you only just…”

“Yeah, yeah,” interrupted Tom. “We had some issues with the fuel eating through the tank, so we had to start from scratch with a different formula.”

Izzy groaned. Of course it had to be another off-planet order! Purchasing would never let her hear the end of it!

“But,” said Tom brightly, “once that fuel arrives“, he mimed a zooming ship while mouthing ‘Boom’, “that ship will run circles around baseline Human or Qosath tech!”

“Super!” said Izzy and gave Tom a double-thumbs up. “The Qosath will be glad to hear it!”

She refrained from pointing out that the project deadline had passed two weeks ago and the Qosath had been sending Lukas furious messages about Earth’s inability to honour its contracts for at least two months before that.

“Well…”

“Well, what?” snapped Izzy.

“Well, assuming we can figure out what’s causing the incompatibility in the navigation system.”

Izzy took a deep breath, but before she could shout at Tom for mentioning the important part last, Dilara piped up: “Actually we just figured that out half an hour ago!”

Eiska growled loudly and gave Dilara what Izzy assumed was a glare - you couldn’t always tell with all the hair covering Eiska’s eyes. Dilara looked up at her colleague with a bemused expression and corrected herself: “Eiska figured it out on her own, actually.”

“Yes,” said Eiska, with a much friendlier rumble. “The problem was not a Human-Qosath incompatibility at all.”

“It wasn’t?” asked Izzy.

“Oh no, it was a Human-Human incompatibility.” Eiska laughed a deep, roaring laugh, making her hairy stomach shake.

“Explain, please.”

“Yeah, don’t be dramatic, Eiska,” whined Dilara. “Some blockhead in the American team used imperial measurements, when everything else is obviously in metric, so that’s what screwed up all the calculations.”

“You have got to be kidding me.” Izzy put her head in her hands. “ _That’s_ what set us back several weeks?”

“How is it,” Fasar piped up, flapping their wings so excitedly they left their chair, “that humans cannot even agree on one standardised system of measurements like a proper, civilised society?”

“Oi, watch who you’re calling uncivilised, at least we know how to use a bathroom!” snarled Drew.

“And what’s that supposed to mean, huh?” Fasar asked, fluffing themselves up to twice their usual size. “You’ve got a problem with how I do my business now?”

“If the lot of you can’t act like,” for a moment Izzy considered saying ‘grown-ups’, “professionals, I’m going to have to ask you to take it outside. And you know Eiska is going to wipe the floor with all of you, so let’s just skip that part and get back to work.”

There was some sniggering around the table as Eiska, who had once been distraught for weeks after stepping on a snail, put her face in her hands and gave an exaggerated sigh.

Izzy waited for a moment for the noise to subside.

“Now, I’m personally managing projects G-40 and G-45, so I can just state for the record that everything is on schedule so far, though we may take a little longer than originally expected to make the medical apparatuses fully safe for Humans or Yp due to the radiation levels. Dr. Courval should already have the details, as I discussed the matter with him in person just yesterday. And that leaves…”

Until now the the XR team had been providing a running commentary on every announcement Izzy made and teasing each other in whispers, but now a sudden hush fell over them.

“Project H-83.”

The elephant in the room. Or it would be, if elephants were unfathomable abominations. Izzy took a deep breath. It would have been so much nicer to abandon the project and just pretend the strange little box had never been discovered. It had done enough damage already. But no, Lukas demanded progress. Of course, it really wasn’t his fault. If it had been up to him, project H-83 would have been locked up in a secure vault and the key thrown in the sea, as he had assured Izzy several times during their last conversation. But his hands were as tied as Izzy’s.

And speaking of tied hands…

“First of all, I have some good news. I visited Mirko at the hospital yesterday. They still have to keep him restrained, but he’s down to about one or two screaming fits a day and he was actually responsive for about an hour a few days ago. The doctors think there’s a high chance of full recovery, eventually.”

The news was met with cheering and clapping. Dilara shouted “Oh sweet!” and clinked her datapad with Tom’s, while Fasar bounced all the way to the ceiling on the rebound from a high five and toppled over their chair as they came down.

It would have been so much more pleasant to call the meeting adjourned on this positive note than to interrupt the cheering, but the rapidly flashing cursor on the screen in front of her reminded Izzy that she had no choice.

“UNFORTUNATELY,” Izzy shouted over the noise and the cheering subsided while Fasar sheepishly set their chair back upright, “Headquarters isn’t going to let up on this particular project and have repeatedly demanded results. I’ve been contacting some external experts who may be able to help us, but so far I haven’t received a response. At any rate…”

Eiska had stretched herself to her tallest height in her chair and was waving one of her giant paws in the air.

“No, Eiska, I know what you’re going to say and I’m not going to authorise it. We have plenty of evidence that the Box doesn’t just affect Humans and we don’t know…”

“We will not be your laboratory animals,” shouted Fasar and in their excitement, their voice turned even more high-pitched than usual. It was a small miracle that anyone but the youngest engineers could actually hear Fasar’s tantrums. “Just because we are not Human. It is out of the question! It is discrimination! It is…”

Drew turned to Fasar and said something that, judging from the look on his face, must have been pretty scathing, but Fasar’s voice was so shrill it drowned out Drew’s words entirely. Several people were already clamping their hands to their ears.

“Oh will you just shut up?” snapped Tom, as he scrabbled for something better to block out the noise.

“Yes, please, Fasar do settle down. I am not asking you to be our lab rat. Or any of our other extraterrestrial team members, for that matter. Quite the opposite, actually.” Izzy pointed a warning finger at Eiska, “I am specifically prohibiting you from getting anywhere near the Box until further notice.”

“But…”

“How do you think I’ll feel if I lose one of my best engineers to some entirely unnecessary heroic stunt, just because she thinks Humans are flimsy and she can handle whatever incomprehensible horror that box unleashed on Mirko?”

“But if I just…”

“Our team is already several people short, Eiska! And besides, weren’t you about to head to your niece’s coming of age? I don’t want to have to call your family and tell them you can’t make it because you’re a gibbering wreck now! No more reckless experiments!”

“But, Chief…”

“No!” snapped Izzy, beginning to feel like she had just been demoted from school teacher to babysitter.

Eiska slouched back down in her chair and mumbled “Okay.”

“Now if I’m not mistaken, you have drawn up some theories on how to disable the Box’s protective mechanism, Drew?”

There was no reaction. Drew was still glaring holes into the screen of his laptop.

Izzy stared at the inspirational holo image on her tea cup. ‘TeamWORKS’ - image flip - Smiling people and a chart going up - image flip - ‘Bring people together’. She bit back a groan.

She’d never been as good at this whole people management thing as Headquarters apparently believed. She was probably expected to talk to Fasar about why they were feeling discriminated against and to Drew about whatever the hell had gotten him glowering at everyone for a month now and to Eiska about following instructions and to the entire team about what constituted acceptable interactions in the workplace. Who the hell had time for all of that? Her team worked just fine as long as they were actually left alone to do their work and not dragged into interminable meetings!

“Drew?”

“Huh?”

“The protective mechanisms, please?”

“Oh yeah. You’ve already seen everything I’ve got. I can forward you the notes if you want, but I’m still waiting for the pleythium delivery for the protective suits. Can’t do anything until we get that. Not safely at any rate, but if Eiska desperately wants to get mindfucked...”

This time Izzy couldn’t bite back her groan. She’d have to censor the minutes after all, wouldn’t she?

“No! Headquarters can wait.”

Izzy reached over to the screen with the minutes and bolded that last sentence manually. She briefly considered underlining it, too, but decided that would be one step too far.

“They’ll have to wait rather a long time, won’t they?” said Tom offhandedly.

“What?”

“That delivery’s gotten delayed.”

“Wait, what?”

“Yeah, Devin mentioned it to me just now in passing.”

“And he didn’t think to maybe let me know? I know nobody cares, but I _am_ still in charge around these parts, you know!” said Izzy, throwing up her arms.

“I told him he should!” said Tom apologetically. “But you know what Devin’s like.”

“Unfortunately yes,” sighed Izzy. “Did he say why?”

“Ask him.”

“Yeah, right,” said Izzy, thinking back to the last time she had attempted in vain to get any comprehensible information out of that jackass. “I guess I’m just going to have to take even more time out of my work day and go up to Devin’s office, aren’t I?”

“Well, you _are_ still in charge around these parts, you know,” echoed Tom with a smirk, eliciting a few chuckles from the people around him.

“One of these days I will accidentally run over the person who put me in that position!” muttered Izzy, checked the screen to see if her last comment had been recorded and angrily hit submit without editing anything at all.

Lukas would probably be complaining about the lack of information, but it was his own damn fault for requesting a meeting rather than just sifting through the engineers’ notes like a sensible person. And with the prospect of a conversation with Devin in her future, Izzy really could not stand another minute of wasted time today.

“The meeting’s over. Everyone get the hell back to work.”

The room heaved a collective sigh of relief.

 

* * *

 

That evening Izzy left work in a thoroughly rotten mood. On her way to the bus, she stopped at her favourite takeaway for pizza. Within moments she came to regret her decision, when the man behind the counter turned out to be so awkward about handing her card back that the damn thing ended up on the floor.

“Oh, are you fucking kidding me?” she muttered while the man rushed around the counter, apologising profusely.

“Oh, don’t bother. I can reach,” she said, biting back a scream of rage and bending over the side of her wheelchair to grab the card off the disgustingly greasy floor, then she left without another word.

By the time she reached her bus stop, she could only just see her bus leaving in the distance.

“OH FUCK!” she screamed, making a few people around her jump and glance at her with a mixture of concern and disapproval, then quickly look away when their eyes met hers.

She knew she was being ridiculous, what was an extra fifteen minutes in the grand scheme of things? Fifteen minutes in the cold drizzle. Headquarters had sent her to London years ago, but she’d never stop missing the weather back home.

Maybe, she thought as she took a bite of her already lukewarm pizza, she ought to get the bottom half of her body chopped off and replaced after all. That way she would be able to use the damn underground station nearby that they still hadn’t made fucking wheelchair-accessible. And it would make Devin so happy!

The thought was putting her off her pizza, so she tried to think of something else. It wasn’t working very well, her mind insisted on flitting back and forth between the nauseatingly disorienting image of herself with cybernetic legs and Devin’s smug face. Fortunately, her phone chose that exact moment to buzz in her pocket.

A message from Ana had popped up on the screen: “We still on for tonight?”

Before Izzy could do so much as reply “Yeah”, another message followed: “Busy atm! Just let yourself in!”

She smiled. Of course, Ana hadn’t for a moment actually considered the option that they _weren’t_ on for tonight. Izzy, on the other hand, had completely forgotten…

Fortunately Ana’s place was on the same bus route. Within half an hour she had reached the front door of her friend’s flat. She pressed her hand to the scanner and heard the familiar buzz of the door unlocking.

The moment she entered Ana’s ridiculously oversized flat, she could hear her shouting from the bedroom.

“Oh, the bastard! Yeah, you can tell him where his lawyer can shove it! Where the hell is he getting off blaming this on _us_ ? It’s hardly our fault he thought it was a good idea to fill them up with coffee like that! There wasn’t anything _left_ to damage by the time we arrested them! I know it’s not your fault, but this is completely ridiculous. What does he think he’ll get out of this? There were witnesses! Urgh, really? Do I have to? That’s three hours before my shift even starts … I only just got … alright … alright, calm down, I know you’re just doing your job, I’ll come in early. Bye. Yes. Bye.”

There was a loud crash, an even louder “BLOODY FUCKING HELL!” and then Ana, fuming like a boiling kettle, burst through her bedroom door into the hallway, glaring at nothing in particular until she spotted Izzy and her frown instantly melted into a wide smile.

“Izzy!”

“Ana!” Izzy echoed with a smirk.

“Damn, did you hear all of that?” asked Ana, waving vaguely in the direction of her bedroom.

“Um, pretty sure they’re calling in noise complaints about you up in the orbital habs right about now, sorry.”

Ana stomped into the kitchen, quickly shoved some chairs aside to make room for Izzy, then dropped into one of the chairs with a loud groan.

“I’ve had a bit of a day.”

“Yeah, I gathered. Coffee-fueled rampage then?”

Izzy didn’t envy Ana. She wouldn’t soon forget that fateful day when Eiska had discovered the miracle of caffeine. Nor would anyone else - it had taken two days to clean up the mess and the entire building was now restricted to herbal teas and hot chocolate to avoid any future mishaps. And that had just been soft-spoken, good-natured Eiska all by her lonesome.

“Ah,” Ana waved her hand dismissively, “no, that was really just the cherry on top of a shit sundae! The entire day has been a bloody mess. Just this morning … hold on, drinks. Right. Sorry, I’m still all over the place. Water? Tea? Copious amounts of gin?”

Izzy laughed. “Tea’s fine, thanks!”

“Aw, damn, I was hoping you’d go for the gin.”

Izzy tried to look apologetic. “Maybe some other time. Work’s crazy right now. If I turn up with a hangover in the middle of the week, my team will never let me live it down.”

“You’re their boss, what can they do about it?”

Izzy let out a bitter little laugh. “Sure, maybe that works when everyone you’re in charge of stands to attention and salutes when you enter a room. I can barely keep that circus under control while I’m sober!”

And before Izzy realised it, she was already mid-way through a long rant about her work: “... and then I had to go all the way up to Purchasing and _then_ I couldn’t even get into that complete dickwad Devin’s office because of his fucking filing cabinets. XR hasn’t used a hard copy file in … ever, actually, as far as I know! So I end up having to shout at him through the crack in the door and you know what he tells me?” She made her voice go squeaky and nasal to imitate Devin. “‘You really need to ditch that chair, Isabella dear, and get some proper legs, it would solve so many of your problems.’”

“No way!” gasped Ana.

“Yes! And all the doors in the building are easily wide enough for my chair to fit! If he ditched those damn cabinets and got a proper filing system instead, that would solve my problems, too.”

“That is so fucked up! Tell me you reported him.”

“Of course I didn’t,” sighed Izzy and took a sip of the now lukewarm tea.

“But you should! He can’t just get away with saying stuff like that!”

“Oh, what’s the point? He’s probably right. I should just get over myself and get it done.” The thought alone was making her stomach turn, but she pressed on. “I mean, it really doesn’t make sense to be creeped out by it. Half your squad has some kind of augmentation and it doesn’t seem to have done them any harm.”

“Yeah, well, nobody’s expecting _you_ to tackle gangs of coffee-addled extraterrestrials on a bi-weekly basis,” Ana pointed out. “You can do your job perfectly well as is. Tell Devin he can go suck it. Or better, yet, actually fucking report him! You don’t have to put up with that shit.”

Izzy ignored her: “Besides, then I wouldn’t have to take the bus to work anymore.”

“You know,” said Ana, giving Izzy a look of utter exasperation, “instead of getting yourself sliced up and put back together, you could just buy a fucking car already!”

“I’m not made of money, Ana!”

“Bollocks!” Ana replied loudly. “You work in XR. You’ve got to be drowning in cash. You could buy yourself a private spaceship and you’d still have enough money left over to get your mum a matching model, too!”

“Oh shut up,” said Izzy, balling up a paper towel and tossing it at Ana’s head. Ana ducked deftly.

“What’s the use of working yourself to death, if you can’t even heave your exhausted corpse into a luxury car at the end of the day? Live a little!”

Ana took a sip of tea and Izzy quickly seized the moment of silence before it passed: “Speaking of work, didn’t you want to tell me about your day?”

“Sure, change the subject,” said Ana, grinning.

“No, I swear, I genuinely want to know.”

Ana got up to put the kettle on for another round of tea, then sat back down and took a deep breath.

“So, you know how there was this whole kerfuffle about whether to actually make an announcement about the restricted districts?”

Izzy nodded. Ana’s input had been absolutely instrumental in convincing Headquarters that they couldn’t just commandeer entire abandoned industrial districts and put them under heavy guard without telling the public _something._ They had been reluctant, but they hadn’t known how to respond when Ana had reminded them of how she had gotten recruited as a child and of how well complete secrecy had worked out for them in the past.

“Yeah, turns out I was a complete idiot.”

“What?”

“You’d think, you’d really think, that if you sent someone to tell the press ‘Hey, so we’re getting a bunch of off-world visitors. We’ll just keep them separate for now ‘cause they look like something out of a really fucked up horror movie and they also don’t much like all the mouth noises humans make, so you’d just end up giving each other panic attacks, unless we introduce you to each other slowly and gradually’ people would just appreciate the fucking honesty, right?”

“Right,” said Izzy noncommittally, as Ana took a deep breath.

“Wrong!” responded Ana. “Apparently what that statement actually translates to is ‘Extraterrestrials want to take over earth, enslave us all and we’re helping them do it, all hail our new overlords!’”

“Wow, just … wow,” sighed Izzy, rubbing her forehead.

“Yeah, wow’s about right. People are so fucking stupid! They think they’re starting some kind of noble revolution against the Evil Threat from Outer Space,” Ana mimed tentacles while rolling her eyes “and really all they’re doing is making a giant nuisance of themselves. At best. Some of them are just straight-up terrorists! I probably shouldn’t even be telling you this, but we’ve had _three_ bomb threats against extraterrestrial settlements in the past two months. Three! And that’s just here in London. It’s been happening all over the place! Pretty much everywhere that has a significant extraterrestrial population! Especially places with Versicolora districts! It’s fucking nuts!”

Izzy noticed she had lifted her tea cup halfway to her mouth only when her hand started shaking and a small wave of tea rained down on her jeans.

“Bomb threats! How come we weren’t told about that!”

“Yeah, I’m surprised Lukas didn’t let anything slip. I know he knows! He spends most of his time at Headquarters. They’ve been telling us to keep it under wraps, though. Avoid people freaking out, you know? Avoid copycats! And well…” Ana gave Izzy a lopsided smile, “avoid letting everyone know we still have no fucking clue who’s responsible. Fortunately nothing’s blown up so far.”

“Damn, what a mess…,” whispered Izzy and brought her cup to her lips, only to discover that the last of the tea had ended up in her lap. “So there was another threat today?”

Ana raised her eyebrows in surprise, then snorted: “Ah, no, hardly! Some drunk idiots managed to get into the Versicolora district somehow. Didn’t get very far before the guards grabbed them, but far enough to spot some of our visitors. So of course they had a huge screaming meltdown of terror and scared the shit out of the entire neighbourhood. It was complete pandemonium when we arrived. Everyone just …” Ana grasped at the air wildly, as though it held a word that could describe the nightmarish sounds of a Versi having a panic attack. She finally settled on, “...screaming, flailing, smashing into things, setting each other off over and over again.”

“Yeah, I can imagine,” said Izzy. She only knew one Versi in person and had only heard them do what Ana had just very insufficiently described as ‘screaming’ a single time, but that was more than enough to picture the terror of a whole Versi neighbourhood screeching their non-existent lungs out in pain.

“And there’s only one guy on the squad who actually has a decent handle on their language. So he’s off trying to explain to the three or four Versis that are actually still responsive that no, everything’s fine, they’re not going to die, while the rest of us are trying to wrestle the other two dozen or so into sound-cancelling headsets and the idiot gang into handcuffs before anyone gets seriously hurt.”

“Nobody _did_ get hurt, did they?” asked Izzy anxiously.

“Not very. One of the idiots twisted his ankle and a few of the Versis ended up with scratches, but nothing some well-placed bandages can’t handle. Anyway, we took those jackasses back to the station and you know what they did?”

“Go on!” said Izzy, now on the edge of her seat.

“Dropped to their knees and started pleading with us not to kill them.”

“ _Kill_ them?” gasped Izzy. “What the fuck? Why would they think you’d _kill_ them?”

“But haven’t you heard, the Bureau’s full of traitors to humankind, all we do is torture people and make them disappear in the name of our extraterrestrial masters and if you cross us you’re as good as dead. Oh yeah, and we do experiments on Humans, too.”

“Well, technically that last bit is true,” said Izzy, pointing to herself.

“... on prisoners.”

Izzy scoffed. “Nobody actually believes that bullshit, though!”

“Oh, but they do! And let’s be honest, if you weren’t part of the Bureau, wouldn’t you?”

Izzy thought back to the days before she had been recruited, when she had been a child, unaware of the existence of extraterrestrial lifeforms, but only too acutely aware of what police brutality was.

Ana didn’t wait for an answer. It seemed Izzy’s face had said it all.

“See? They’re idiots, but you can’t really blame them. After decades of secrecy we go ‘Hey guys, by the way, there’s life on other planets, they’re here now, we’ve been hiding a bunch of them for a while, meet your new neighbours’ and now they’re supposed to believe we’re telling them the everything?”

“Which we’re not,” Izzy pointed out.

“Which we’re not,” said Ana nodding. “And let’s be honest: The new neighbours really _are_ an acquired taste.”

“Aw, come on now!” protested Izzy. “I know they make you handle all the assholes, but…”

“I’m not saying they have a higher asshole ratio than Humans, for fuck’s sake, Izzy, you know I’m not xenophobic. But you’ve got to admit they’re kind of freaky to look at until you get used to them. I mean, sure, some of them are downright … cute and cuddly once you’re past the initial shock.”

Izzy thought of her non-human coworkers and laughed, imagining the tantrum Fasar would throw at being called cute and cuddly - though, admittedly, they really were pretty adorable. Izzy had occasionally pinched her own arm to avoid the overwhelming urge to pinch Fasar’s cheeks instead.

“But then you’ve got the Versis …”

“Good point,” said Izzy. The first time she had ever been face to face with one, she’d been convinced it would eat her. In hindsight she had felt rather silly to find out Versicolora didn’t even have teeth and subsisted on a diet of liquified fungi.

“Let’s just hope the Z-I-15 never decide to visit. We’ll have a civil war on our hands!”

Izzy frowned. “You really think so?”

She did not know much about the most recently discovered extraterrestrial species. Nobody seemed to. Attempts to communicate with them were still an ongoing project that nobody, neither Humans nor anyone else, had succeeded in so far.

Ana rolled her eyes at Izzy: “Have you _seen_ them?”

“Just pictures. I suppose they do look a little creepy, if you’re not used to extraterrestrials.”

“A little creepy? They look like somebody crossed Cthulhu with a komodo dragon. And they don’t speak. You know what people are like about intelligent lifeforms that don’t speak. They will be losing their minds.”

“Oh, hey, that reminds me,” Izzy interjected, “I’m actually working on a project we suspect they may have had a hand in.”

“Huh, I didn’t know any of their technology had left their planet!” said Ana, leaning forward with interest. “Cool!”

“No, not cool! We haven’t been able to figure out shit about how it works or what it even is. Might be a weapon. Might just be having some unintended side effects. It’s sophisticated beyond anything anyone at XR has ever encountered, though, and we’re at a bit of a loss, to say the least. But Headquarters insists we figure it out, whatever it takes, so...” Izzy gave a helpless shrug.

“Ah, damn,” said Ana and poured more tea. Just as she grabbed the milk, a sudden smile appeared on her face.

“Hey, I know someone who could help you,” she said, setting down the milk and pulling out a datapad, which she shoved under Izzy’s nose. She had brought up a newspaper article from a few weeks ago. Before Izzy even started reading, she already knew where this was going.

And indeed, the headline was no surprise: “Sniffing out success: Dr. Raul Alves decodes extraterrestrial communication method.”

The photo beneath the headline showed Ana’s little brother sitting at his desk, making an awkward grimace that might have been intended as a smile. If his name hadn’t been in the headline, Izzy doubted she would have recognised him. He actually had a beard now! The last time she’d seen him, he’d barely had a few moustache hairs!

Izzy read on: “Dr. Raul Alves (27), celebrated founder and youngest professor of the first university department of Xenocommunication, has made a breakthrough discovery in the deconstruction of the pheromone-based communication method used by Species Z-I-15. This extraterrestrial species inhabiting…”

She stopped reading and turned to Ana: “So you’re reduced to reading the news to catch up with Raul these days?”

Ana snorted. “I wish! The little shit sends me daily updates on all the galas he’s been invited to. He even got an invitation from the White House recently, if you’ll believe it.” Her words may have sounded frustrated, but there was a soft smile on Ana’s face and Izzy didn’t know when she had last heard the word ‘shit’ sound so tender.

“Wait a minute! Galas? _Raul?_ ” Izzy hadn’t seen Raul in ages, but unless he had changed a lot from the boy she had known, imagining Raul at a gala was about equivalent to imagining a Versi at a disco.

“Oh, he hasn’t actually gone to any of them. He just gets a kick out of reminding me who’s the more successful sibling.”

“Hey, don’t sell yourself short, Commander Alves!” Izzy gave a mock salute.

Ana responded with a “Ph!” and poured some milk into her tea.

“I don’t even _want_ to trade places. Everyone wants a piece of him. It’s driving him nuts. He says he can’t focus. But I’m sure he’d make an exception for you.”

Izzy sighed. Who did Ana think she was kidding? She suddenly regretted mentioning the Box at all! Of course Ana would draw the connection to Raul. Like Izzy hadn’t! Like Raul hadn’t been the first person to come to mind when she’d first laid eyes on the Box. Like Izzy hadn’t hovered over the send button for a full minute before finally deleting the message she had already spent two hours writing and rewriting over and over again.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” she finally said.

Ana’s disapproval was palpable. “He’s been up to his neck in Z-I-15 research for months, Izzy, if he can’t help you, nobody can.”

“I don’t want to bother him.”

“Oh, bullshit!” snapped Ana, shot up from her chair and began pacing back and forth next to the table. “The two of you need to get over yourselves! How long are you going to keep this up? It’s been fourteen years.”

“You’ve been counting,” Izzy said with a wry smile.

“You’re acting like an ass! You’re not going to get a better opportunity, you know. Come on! You can’t possibly still be feeling awkward and neither can he.”

But Ana hadn’t been there that day. She hadn’t heard the screaming, the ugly accusations levelled at her brother: “If you didn’t love aliens more than your own family, you mute fucking bastard, I wouldn’t be stuck in this hellhole! I’d be home!”

Ana had been miles away in a training camp when that door was slammed shut and Izzy and Raul had been left alone in that dormitory room and Izzy’s sobbing had very nearly drowned out the sound of Raul’s text-to-speech device repeating “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry” over and over again. Ana didn’t know…

Izzy had been so caught up in her memories that she flinched hard and knocked her fortunately empty cup over when Ana’s datapad buzzed.

“Hey, speak of the devil!” shouted Ana. “Perfect timing, you can just ask him in person!”

She slid up next to Izzy and held the datapad so that they could both see the little “Raul Alves is calling” message next to the image of his face.

“No, he doesn’t want to see me!” shouted Izzy and tried to push the datapad aside.

“Bullshit!” responded Ana. “He needs to get his act together.”

“Don’t!”

But Ana had already tapped the “Accept” button and the messenger window opened up before Izzy had a chance to duck away.

“Hey, bro, what’s… Gus?”

Both women had expected Raul’s face to appear. And what appeared was, in fact, a face - of sorts. Several pools of bright red slime flashing angrily in skin so yellow it was making Izzy’s eyes hurt and facial limbs flailing wildly, the person greeting them wasn’t Raul. It was Gus, the Versi, the very first extraterrestrial any of them had ever met and arguably, from what Izzy had heard, Raul’s best friend. Their head was stuck in a noise-cancelling headset.

“What the hell… erm …how do I ...  urgh…”

Ana had opened the messenger’s Versispeech add-on and was now trying her hardest to piece together a flashing colour sequence that wasn’t entirely nonsense. Izzy recognised the colours of Gus’s real name - the nickname ‘Gus’ had come about due to Lukas constantly referring to the Versi as “our guest”, for lack of a way to incorporate rapid sequences of greenish-purple into everyday conversation.

What followed was a long pause, as Ana’s fingers hovered over the screen and Gus continued to flash in all the colours of an out-of-control bushfire.

Ana turned to Izzy with a pleading look on her face.

Izzy shrugged helplessly. Like Ana, she had never gotten the hang of the Versis’ communication method. In fact, it made her queasy just to watch Gus right now. But it didn’t take a Xenocommunication specialist to figure out that Gus was very, very upset.

“Fuck it, I give up!” Ana said, closed the Versispeech window and typed: “Can we use words, please.”

If Gus could have looked puzzled, Izzy suspected they would have. There was a long pause in which Gus was clearly hovering over letters that were just as confusing to them as Versispeech was to Ana and Izzy. Finally ‘Raul is typing’ was replaced by two typed words “Raul gone.”

Ana’s fingers flew across the screen: “What the hell do you mean Raul is gone?”

“Ana!” Izzy put a hand on her friend’s shoulder. “Keep it simple.”

Ana deleted half of what she had written and instead wrote “What do you mean?”

The two women stared in silence at the screen. A scratching noise alerted Izzy to the fact that her friend was scraping the table with her fingernails.

After what felt like an eternity, Gus’s response appeared: “Meet Raul at Raul home. But no Raul. Raul gone. Raul hurt.”

Ana’s face had grown deadly pale. She wasn’t breathing. Her hands were shaking hard enough to make the spoons on the table rattle.

“Ana.”

She didn’t respond.

“Ana!”

Ana lifted her hands back to the screen, but Izzy had already wrenched it from her.

“HEY!”

“Listen, Ana, we don’t know what’s going on. Raul is probably fine! But we won’t find out if you freak out on Gus. Let me do the talking.”

“Alright,” said Ana, sounding very much like things had never been less alright in her life. “Alright! You can do the talking, but fucking talk! Ask him what’s going on?” She paused for a moment, then, desperation thick in her voice added: “Please, Izzy.”

Izzy considered for a moment, then typed: “Can I talk to your escort?”

“No escort. Alone,” was the response. Izzy could have kicked herself. Of course, Gus had been running around on his own, wrapped in a long hooded cloak and noise-cancelling headgear since the public had been informed of the existence of extraterrestrial life. Unlike the other Versis, he’d never had an escort. Unless you counted Raul. And Raul was gone.

“Maybe Raul just forgot they were meeting!” she said, if only to calm down Ana, who had now gone from scratching the table to making her knuckles crack and looked like one wrong word might make her rip off somebody’s head. As Izzy was the only person nearby, she didn’t want to risk it.

After some pondering, Izzy wrote: “Why do you think Raul is hurt?” She hoped Gus would understand.

It took them a while to respond and Izzy was already thinking hard of a simpler way to phrase her request, when Gus’s face suddenly disappeared from the screen and was replaced with what had to be Raul’s apartment.

Izzy had never been there, but she had spent years living with Raul. In those years he had told the others off for being messy so frequently that he had eventually just created a shortcut for the phrase “Please pick up after yourself” in his text to speech program. He would never have left his flat in the state Gus was showing them right now.

And was that…

Izzy heard Ana’s soft gasp when the image zoomed in on what looked like a sizable blood stain on the wooden floor boards.

A hiss of “Shit” escaped Izzy’s mouth just as Gus repeated once more “Raul hurt.”

With a loud crash, a tea cup fell to the floor as Ana shot up out of her chair.

“We need to go!” she shouted.

“Go where?” asked Izzy.

“What do you mean, ‘go where’? Raul needs our help, Izzy! Now! We need to go!”

She ran to grab her coat and her gear and was already halfway out the door, guns dangling on her hips, before Izzy could get to the door and block her path.

“ANA! Stop!”

“Get out of the way!”

“For fuck’s sake, Ana! Raul’s back home! What do you think you’re going to accomplish? Even if you hopped in a plane right this second, it would take you half a day to get to him!”

Ana practically crumpled as the words reached her brain. Her shoulders slumping, her face an image of utter despair, she stood by the door unmoving, her hand still grasping the handle.

If it had been any other crisis, there was no doubt Ana would be handling it with that calm stoicism Izzy was always envying. She hadn’t made it to Commander by panicking at the drop of a hat, after all.

But this was Ana’s little brother who might be hurt. Might be dead, even. Izzy could barely hear herself think over the rapid beating of her own heart in her ears. Her stomach was turning so hard she feared that a frothy mixture of pizza and tea would end up on Ana’s carpet any second now. She couldn’t do this! Somebody had to do something!

In desperation, she almost called out to the person just behind her, but she caught herself in time. Of course, there was nobody there. Just her and Ana. She had to pick up the slack herself!

Izzy left Ana standing paralysed by the door and returned to the kitchen, where she grabbed the datapad. The messenger window was full of Gus’s attempts to communicate, but he was obviously freaking out way too much to deal with the unfamiliar system of speech right now. Izzy didn’t even bother scrolling up. She didn’t think Gus had said anything that couldn’t be summarised by the endless repeats of “What do? Raul hurt. What do?” rapidly filling the screen.

“Have you told anyone else?” she wrote.

There was a long pause while Gus tried to parse what she had written. But they didn’t have time for pauses now! Raul might have been dragged God knows where and every second mattered. If not for Raul, then for Ana, who still hadn’t moved and was clearly well on her way to a complete breakdown.

“I will call the Bureau!” Izzy wrote and hit ‘Send’ as she picked up her phone with the other hand.

But the very moment her hand touched her phone, it began to buzz. Startled, Izzy flinched, then looked at the screen. Why the hell was Dilara calling her? It had better be something urgent! She’d told them a thousand times they didn’t need to call her over minor issues that they could easily fix themselves. And why now of all times? Nobody would even be working at this hour...

Izzy was just about to ignore the call - she’d deal with Dilara’s inevitable complaints in the morning - when she heard Ana by the door answering her own phone, her voice perfectly calm now, as though she hadn’t just one second ago been so panicked she’d forgotten Raul lived half a world away: “Alves! … Yes … Just now? … I understand …”

Izzy’s phone stopped buzzing for a moment, then immediately started up again. This wasn’t normal. Dilara wasn’t this persistent! With an uncomfortable churning in her stomach, Izzy answered her phone.

“What is it?”

“Isabella?”

Dilara’s voice sounded so shaky that Izzy swallowed the impulse to ask her who else she had been expecting.

“Yeah. What’s wrong?”

“There’s been a break-in!”

“Break-in? What? I … How?”

Izzy could feel her throat constricting around what, judging from the panicked beating, seemed to be her heart and that wasn’t possible but neither was it possible for someone to break into XR. Not with all of the security. They couldn’t have.

“I don’t know! I don’t know...”

“Is anyone hurt?”

“They … some guards … the team … we’d all gone home … but … they got … knocked out or something but they’re fine now, I think, but …”

Dilara was speaking so fast and her words were so garbled that it was hard to make sense of anything she was saying, but somehow Izzy knew. After everything that had happened in the past few hours, she just knew. But she had to ask anyway: “What did they take?”

And in that split second between her question and Dilara’s answer, Izzy felt herself leaving her body, floating inches above her own head. By all rights she shouldn’t have been able to hear the voice reaching the ears that now seemed completely disconnected from her mind. But she did: “The Box! They took the Box!”

Project H-83 was gone.


	2. Chapter 2

When she later thought back to this moment, Izzy could barely remember how she had ended up back at XR. It seemed that at some point after Dilara’s phone call, Ana’s training had kicked back in. While Izzy sat unmoving, paralysed with fear, Ana had called up Xenosecurity in Rio to alert them to Raul’s disappearance and had told Gus to stay exactly where they were until the squad arrived. Then she had grabbed hold of Izzy and dragged her to her car, where she had tossed both Izzy and her chair into the car with ease.

After a wild and unusually fast ride through town, they had arrived back at the building housing Xenoengineering Research. Izzy suspected that Ana had deactivated her car’s autonomous driving function and broken a few traffic laws to boot, but she couldn’t tell for sure. Her mind was working just well enough to have finally found its way back into her body - small details like barely escaping death in a fiery inferno were far beyond her now.

Someone, some unknown but terrifyingly competent criminal, had taken the Box. Did the Xenosecurity squad currently buzzing around offices and labs or interrogating the terrified engineers waiting outside the building even know what that meant? Did they understand even a fraction of the implications? They couldn’t or they, too, would be huddled on the ground like Izzy’s team, deadly pale, staring at nothing in particular, giving one and two word answers when they were spoken to, too deep in shock to say anything useful.

Most of the investigators had long given up trying to talk to the engineers in favor of the admin staff, who were clueless enough to be merely distraught rather than raving or catatonic.

Nearby, a very persistent investigator nonetheless seemed to be arguing with Eiska, who had quite obviously had it with the man. Izzy couldn’t hear what he was saying, but Eiska’s voice penetrated even the roar in her ears.

“Listen, I’ve told you three times already, I can’t just tell them to come here! They’re not answering their phones! They might have gotten hurt! Well, yes, of course the lab was closed, but have you never heard of overtime? No, I have plenty of reason to be upset, our most dangerous project is gone, five of my coworkers are still nowhere to be found and all you care about is pestering me! What if they’re dead?”

Izzy would have asked who Eiska was talking about, if only she had been able to bring herself to speak. But her brain and her mouth seemed utterly disconnected and she feared she might just start crying uncontrollably the moment a single word passed her lips.

“Oh, good, finally someone who knows what they’re doing! Officer?”

Izzy turned to see who Eiska was waving at and saw Ana striding out of the building and across the parking lot in their direction, the stripes on her shoulders glinting in the light of the street lamps.

She was surrounded by a fast-cycling gaggle of underlings giving reports and getting new orders. Here she was all firm tones and icy professionalism, nothing like after the call with Gus.

“... going to need two people - Poole, Day, the two of you - to drive to the hospital and question the guards as soon as possible.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And Smith.”

“Ma’am?”

“Have another look at the security system. Go through it with a fine tooth comb! Take as long as you need. There has to be something. It’s simply impossible for the whole damn system to look like nothing happened after a breach of this magnitude! I’d ask someone who knows the system to help you out, but, well …”

“I understand, ma’am. I’m on it.”

As Smith disappeared, Ana turned toward Izzy and gave her a curt nod and a forced smile. 

Somehow this subdued acknowledgement was just the trigger Izzy’s shock-delayed emotions needed to bubble back to the surface. Before she knew what she was doing, Izzy was unloading all the fear and anguish of the past hours in a scream of rage: “How can you be so fucking calm about this? Don’t you get it? That’s not just any project that went missing! That’s the - fucking - Box!”

Ana was giving her an utterly blank stare. Izzy wanted to shake her.

“You know where we fucking found it? On a ship full of Qosath eating their own damn insides! From the outside! Or someone else did, I don’t fucking know because they were all too goddamn crazy or, you know, DEAD to tell us!”

Ana was still staring in silence. Izzy could have looked at that face for hours without figuring out what was going on inside her head. Only one thing was obvious: Ana hadn’t taken in a single word she had said. She was just standing there, like a statue, unmoving, unmoved. Izzy’s only anchor in this nightmare didn’t have half a clue what they were facing. 

Izzy had a sudden urge to punch Ana. To scream in her face that it should have been Ana that disappeared that night fifteen years ago, that she didn’t deserve to still be here with this stupid calm blankness, that if he were here instead he would be doing something. Sure, it would have been something utterly stupid, but he’d have done something - anything but just stand there and goddamn stare.

She didn’t say any of these things nor did she punch Ana. Instead, she took a deep breath and with a shaking voice, she tried once more to explain, to get through to Ana somehow: 

“Listen, one of my team members, Mirko, tried to disarm the Box. He thought he had it all figured out. He didn’t have my authorisation, I didn’t think it was safe, so he waited till night when everyone else had left and that’s the only reason we’re all here to talk to you today. He set up all the mechanisms and he put the Box in a shielded chamber - you could set off a bomb in there and someone standing right outside the door wouldn’t even hear the blast, so he thought he’d be safe. And it went wrong. He’s been in hospital for a year now … tied down … screaming … they have to keep him sedated most of the time …” 

The image of Mirko, emaciated, terrified and in obvious agony as he lay in that hospital bed broke the tiny bit of composure she’d managed to gather. Ana was quickly becoming a blur beyond the tears that were filling her eyes and Izzy could tell she would soon be incapable of making her words understood, so she forced them out as fast as she could before her voice failed her:

“Whoever has the Box now, if they set it off - even by accident - anywhere where there’s people, that thing could fuck up the minds of an entire city, Ana. Permanently, maybe. And we have no idea who’s got it now or why and how are you SO FUCKING CALM?”

The echo of her own scream was ringing in Izzy’s ears, but everything else around her was deadly silent. She lifted her hand to wipe the tears from her eyes. Ana had not moved from the spot. Her expression had not changed an inch.

Then she opened her mouth and whispered: “I’m not calm.”

And that was when the facade began to crumble. It was like watching an avalanche in slow motion. Ana’s hands began to tremble and the blank look in her eyes faded to make way for complete and utter panic.

“They still haven’t gotten back to me, Izzy.”

Izzy didn’t need to ask who she was talking about.

“It’s been hours, they don’t know where he is…”

Did Ana’s subordinates, who were still crowding around her, realise that their Commander had been running on autopilot for hours, putting on a calm face while her insides were churning with fear for her little brother? Maybe they weren’t as fucking oblivious as Izzy who was now kicking herself on the inside because how could she have misunderstood so badly? She’d known Ana her whole life…

“Raul could be dead, Izzy. He could be dead and I’m here trying to figure out what the fuck is going on with your fucking Box.” Her voice was becoming more high-pitched with every word. 

Izzy gasped. It was obvious, wasn’t it? It all made perfect sense now.

“Do you think that Raul might’ve been kidnapped because of the Box? By the same people who stole it? I mean, he’s just about the only person in the world who might be able to figure the damn thing out!”

The look of utter exasperation on Ana’s face told Izzy that her brilliant idea was hardly a revelation.

“Izzy, I couldn’t give less of a shit who they are or why they kidnapped my brother. I want him back! I can’t be here dealing with your shitshow while my little brother is ... “ She clasped her hands to her face in desperation and gave a low moan. “I can’t do this!”

The Xenosecurity squad members still nearby were slowly backing away, looking uncertain and then developing very intent interest in their datapads. It was unlikely they had ever seen Commander Alves as anything but completely collected, let alone in the state she was in right now. Izzy had, a handful of times. Anytime Raul was in danger. But on all those occasions, Raul had been right there to fuss over and sometimes whoever had caused him pain was right there, too, and about to have the worst day of their whole lives. But who knew where Raul was right now. Without a second’s hesitation, Ana would have sacrificed her sanity to a million ineffable nightmares for a single chance to get her brother back alive. But nobody was asking her to do that. They were asking her to act like everything was normal and it was killing her.

Izzy reached out to touch Ana’s arm, but Ana flinched away. 

“I’m sorry, Ana, I …”

Not knowing what to say, Izzy fell silent. At that very moment, a soft paw fell on her shoulder.

“What’s this about a brother?” asked Eiska, giving Ana such a tender look that Izzy had a sudden urge to hug her.

Izzy tried to explain, in as few words as she could, the devastating conversation they’d had with Gus earlier that evening.

“... and if it’s the same people there and here that’s … really bad …” Izzy ended her explanation rather anticlimactically.

“Yes, but,” Eiska said, sounding baffled, “what I don’t get is, why is your friend,” she pointed at Ana, “here if her brother needs help in Rio.”

Ana let out a heart-rending howl.

“Eiska!” snapped Izzy. “You’re not helping! How the hell are we going to get to Rio in time to do any good at all. Especially now with all of this shit going on! The Bureau’s not just going to let us borrow one of their ships to pop off to Rio for a minute, they’ll want Ana right here to investigate the break-in.”

Eiska snorted in disgust. “Excuses! Your family needs help, you help them. If it’s transportation you need, you just need to ask, you know!”

“Wait, are you saying…” Izzy stared at Eiska in utter disbelief. She couldn’t possibly be implying what Izzy thought.

“My shuttle is fast enough, if that’s what you’re wondering about. We just need to get to the port. If we leave now…”

“Are you serious?”

Eiska frowned in confusion: “Who would make jokes at a time like this?”

Ana removed her hands from her face. She was deadly pale, but the look in her eyes was unmistakable. They were going to Rio. The decision had been made and she would tolerate no “ifs” and “buts” - though the idea of objecting was far from Izzy’s mind. You didn’t just let people disappear without a fight.

 

* * *

 

 

The trip to Rio was not what Izzy would have called comfortable. Eiska’s shuttle was made for short-distance trips from the planet surface to whatever larger ship was waiting to pick her up in orbit and it was definitely not designed for three occupants. It was only because Ana and Izzy were humans that they managed to squeeze into the shuttle at all. But even so, it was a tight fit and Izzy shuddered to think what her old instructors would have said about the safety concerns.

By the time they arrived, Izzy could barely feel any of her limbs. Ana couldn’t have been a lot more comfortable, judging by the way she was limping and kept shaking her arms as she walked. But it seemed the thought of waiting until the tingling stopped hadn’t even entered her mind. She was racing ahead so fast that even Eiska on her long legs had some trouble keeping up.

By the time they had left the space port, Eiska had offered to push Izzy several times, which the latter had rejected with increasing annoyance. But soon after they hit a bit of sidewalk so slanted that Izzy regretted her decision. Her arms were screaming with the effort of keeping up. Barely even within shouting distance of the others anymore, she finally decided she’d had enough.

“OI! ANA!”

Ana whirled around to stare at her.

“Do you even know where you’re going?”

“Of course I know where I’m going. I’ve been to Raul’s loads of times. If we just …” She looked around in confusion. “Wait…”

“I know you’re used to unquestioning obedience these days, but I’m not playing follow the leader, if the leader doesn’t know where she’s going,” Izzy shouted. “Look at a bloody map before you run off again.”

“I know where I’m going,” snapped Ana. “I just needed to find it again. Stop wasting time.” 

Without asking for permission, Ana grabbed hold of the back of Izzy’s chair and began to push her at a rapid pace. It was a sign of how close they were and, more importantly, how urgent the situation that Izzy refrained from ripping Ana several new orifices right then and there.

A few minutes later they scrambled onto a passing tram just before the doors closed. Ana and Eiska fell into the first empty seats they could find. The seat creaked dangerously under Eiska’s weight, earning them a few disapproving glances from their fellow passengers. Izzy stared back, silently daring them to say anything and make her fucking day. None of them did, however, but when she turned to Ana, she recognised the same come-at-me expression on her face.

A few minutes later they pulled into one of the half-dozen arcologies that made up the vast bulk of the city and came to a stop. They piled out of the tram with the rest of the commuters and found themselves in the dazzling light of one of the stations, several levels above ground. Eiska immediately stomped over to one of the railings and looked down. She gave a nod of approval.

“Fancy!”

“I know, right?” responded Izzy. “London’s a bit behind the times. You’ve got to come here to see something this grand.” 

“It’s huge!” commented Eiska, eyes wide with wonder. “Didn’t know you Humans had it in you.”

Izzy took a deep breath, enjoying the long-familiar smell of the filtered air. Sure, she had spent most of her childhood in a filthy slum. But that was before the Bureau had recruited her. She had spent her teenage years in one of these vast habitats and she had never looked back. Not even once. This was like coming home now.

“Man, I missed this,” she sighed.

“If you actually went to visit your mum every once in a while, you wouldn’t have to miss shit,” growled Ana. 

“I’m really busy with work,” whispered Izzy, blushing. 

That wasn’t entirely true and Ana knew it. Every time Izzy had visited her mum, she’d brought up all the old stories of when Izzy was little. And quite apart from the way that she steadfastly ignored the fact that she had actually missed most of Izzy’s childhood and knew jackshit about what little Izzy had been like, she also kept bringing up events - and people - that Izzy would rather not have thought, let alone talked, about. It was awkward. That’s all there was to it. But she could feel the prickle of Eiska’s look of disapproval on the back of her neck without even turning to look.

Fortunately Ana had no intention of drawing out the awkwardness.

“Can you two stop admiring the architecture now and get a move on?” she said.

Izzy was only too glad to comply.

What felt like a hundred lifts and moving sidewalks later, they had finally reached their destination. Izzy had never been here before, but there was no mistaking it, as the entire area was cordoned off and a Xenosecurity officer was standing guard, leaning leisurely on a wall, eyes closed. 

Even when he heard their footsteps approaching, he didn’t open his eyes: “Sorry, you can’t go through here, you’ll have to go around.”

Without so much as breaking her stride, Ana pulled out her badge and shoved it right in the guard’s face. His eyes popped open, he gasped, then immediately jumped to attention and saluted: “Commander! I am so sorry, I didn’t realise … that’s an entirely different matter, of course, ma’am… ” 

Still looking very bewildered, he turned to Izzy and Eiska and looked them up and down. Finally, still stammering in confusion, he asked: “And, erm, what’s with … how come you’re ... “ his eyes lingered on Eiska even as he addressed Ana once more, “... what about the civilians, ma’am?”

“We’re Xenoengineering Research, London,” answered Izzy, while Eiska remained silent, looking politely puzzled. Izzy suspected that the only Earth language she had ever mastered was English, which, quite frankly, was already an impressive feat. So Izzy knew why she wasn’t talking, but why on earth was she sniffing the air like that?

“Xenoengineering Research?” asked the man, clearly expecting an explanation of why they were there. 

An explanation that Ana was not willing to give: “Yes, indeed, Xenoengineering Research. Now, would you mind stepping aside?” 

“Yes, ma’am. Of course, ma’am.  It’s just that I didn’t know we’d be getting support from London.” 

“What made you think you needed to know?” said Ana, without so much as blushing. 

The man, however, did blush and muttered rather sheepishly: “Nothing. It’s just that I’m currently on my own here and I’m just here to make sure nobody unauthorised enters. I’m not really up to date on the status of the investigation, ma’am. Last I heard the security footage was inconclusive, that’s all I know. Should I call my sup-...”

“You don’t need to call anyone just yet, we’ll have a look around and get in contact with them ourselves. Incidentally, is the Versi who originally informed us of the matter still present?”

“Oh … erm, no, ma’am, they were taken into custody.”

“Custody?” gasped Izzy. “They wouldn’t have called you, if they were involved in the disappearance of Dr. Alves!”

“I assure you,” said the man, lifting his hands in a placating gesture, “it’s all perfectly routine. They will likely be released once we have processed the available evidence.”

He gave Ana a confused and slightly suspicious glance: “Ma’am, are you sure you don’t want me to contact my superior? Something might have gone awry with the communication channels.”

“And we will fix that as soon as we’ve had a look,” said Ana with such conviction that her voice alone seemed to push the man aside.

The path was clear and they entered Raul’s apartment. The mess still looked like it had on the video feed, except someone had clearly been collecting evidence. 

Izzy turned to Ana, who had frozen in place the moment the door of the apartment had closed behind her.

“That was impressive and all, but what do we do now?”

Ana didn’t answer right away. She stood at the centre of the chaos, staring blankly ahead. Behind her, Eiska kept sniffling. Neither of them seemed to be in any hurry to actually do anything and Izzy herself had no idea where to go from here. She was beginning to have the uncomfortable feeling that they shouldn’t have come.

Finally, Ana opened her mouth: “I was hoping Gus would still be here. They spend more time with Raul than anyone else these days, they might have had some kind of clue, some place to start investigating. But if they’ve got Gus in custody… if I try to speak to Gus, they’ll know right away I’m not supposed to be here. They’ll send me back before I get a chance to do anything to help Raul.”

Izzy stared at her friend in wonder. So she had no plan beyond meeting up with Gus? Her entire non-plan had collapsed the moment they had taken Gus into custody! And yet she hadn’t so much as flinched when she’d found out. When Ana was like this, Izzy might as well have been trying to read a Qosath. Izzy was already panicked enough and this was giving her a headache. And Eiska’s constant sniffing was not helping!

Izzy whirled around to her furry colleague and snapped: “Will you please just stop doing that?”

“Sorry, but … it’s coming from this apartment. Definitely.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Izzy.

“The smell. It’s really familiar. I’ve been trying to figure out what it is since we got to this level, but I can’t,” she took a deep breath through the nose, “quite place it. It’s definitely from this apartment, though. It is really bothering me.”

“What smell?” asked Izzy confused, taking a deep breath herself. “The only thing I’m smelling is that Raul had something really garlicky for dinner.”

“Izzy!”

“Not the time for jokes, I know, sorry, Ana, I’m just nervous.”

“No, it’s not that. It’s …” Another sniff and suddenly Eiska’s eyes went wide with recognition. 

“Oh, I know what it reminds me of! It’s a bit like the smell of the Box, right? Not quite as putrid, but it’s definitely the same kind of … what…”

Midway through her monologue Eiska had looked down at Izzy and caught the utter confusion now reflected in her face.

“What are you talking about?” asked Izzy. “The Box doesn’t smell of anything!”

Now it was Eiska’s turn to look confused. In fact, if Eiska had been prone to swearing, she might have given voice to the look currently on her face with a resounding “What the fuck!” Instead, she threw up her arms in exasperation and shouted: “Doesn’t smell? It positively reeks! The lab hasn’t smelled the same since Mirko set it off!”

Izzy let out a snort of disbelief. 

“The damn thing has been haunting the entire department for years and  _ now _ you tell me that you can smell it?”

Eiska wiggled her ears sheepishly. She would have looked downright adorable, if Izzy hadn’t been so pissed off with her. 

“The whole reason we have non-Human engineers on the team is so we can get different perspectives on the same problem! Do you know how useful it would’ve been a year ago to know the damn thing SMELLS?”

“I assumed everyone knew. I mean…” Eiska had lowered her voice to a whisper at this point, “it was kind of hard to miss…”

“You can’t just go making assumptions like that. That smell might open up an entirely new angle of attack! If we’d known about that…”

But before Izzy could really get into a stride, Ana grabbed her shoulder and silenced her with a glance. 

Then she turned to Eiska: “You’re saying you smelled it outside, too?”

“Yeah, since we got up on this level.”

“Do you think you could track it?”

“I don’t know,” said Eiska. “I’ve never tried to track anything.”

“You think it’s Raul’s smell?” Izzy asked, but then answered her own question, before Ana could: “It has to be Raul! We’ve always been suspecting the Box was Z-I-15 technology. If he’s been spending months handling all sorts of unearthly pheromones, something might’ve soaked in!”

“Exactly!” said Ana. Her eyes were glinting with savage hope. “We might be able to find him that way!”

“It’ll be hard to track outside,” Eiska pointed out, “there’s a lot going on. My nose isn’t  _ that _ strong.”

“Please try,” said Ana. She’d said ‘Please’, but there was no mistaking the tone. This wasn’t a request. It was an order. And if Eiska had refused it, Ana would have torn her entire terrifyingly broad 8 foot tall body to shreds without a second’s hesitation.

But Eiska looked like refusing the order was the furthest thing from her mind. She stuck her nose up in the air and took another deep breath. Without intending to, Izzy copied her, but all she could smell was garlic.

“I’ll try,” said Eiska with a sigh as she exhaled. She walked to the door. 

The uniformed man outside jumped in surprise when the door opened. He clearly had not expected them to emerge so soon.

“Should I…”

“No,” snapped Ana, as she rushed after Eiska, who was now leading the way, nose in air. “We’ll contact them ourselves.”

“Wait, ma’am, you’re Commander Alves, right? Is there any relation…”

But they were long gone by the time the suspicious guard ever finished his question. Izzy noticed the passersby staring in concern as they rushed past. They had to be quite a sight, a giant hairy extraterrestrial led by her nose and followed by a woman in a Xenosecurity uniform glaring maniacally and a distraught-looking woman in a wheelchair, all three of them looking like they had neither showered nor slept in days. Though it was likely that even on her own, Eiska would have caused somewhat of a stir. Since they’d entered this arcology, Izzy had spotted maybe a handful of non-Humans. It seemed they kept to themselves around here much more than they did in London, even the ones not prone to creeping out the average person like the Versis did.

They had reached one of the lifts down to the lower levels now and Eiska stopped, looking round to Ana with concern: “It gets pretty patchy here. He might have gone down in this lift or he might not have. I’m sorry, I can’t really tell.”

“Understood,” said Ana. “We’ll go down one level, you’ll have a sniff around and we’ll rinse and repeat until you’ve located the scent again.”

In Eiska’s position, Izzy would have felt the sudden need to salute sarcastically, but she doubted that Eiska had ever done anything sarcastic in her life.

They entered the lift and went down a level, but after Eiska had sniffed around for a few minutes, she shook her head sadly. They did as Ana had ordered, repeating the whole process over and over again to the point that some of the people in the lift had now seen them jump out and back into the lift several times. Apart from a few confused looks, several people had already asked Ana if they needed any help finding their way. 

They were drawing a lot of attention and it was beginning to worry Izzy. With no idea who had caused the disappearance of Raul, they might be putting themselves or Raul in danger, not to mention that they were going to be in a hell of a lot of trouble with Headquarters once they figured out that three Bureau members from London had just burst into an active crime scene in a completely different city entirely unauthorised, while they were all supposed to be aiding an investigation in their own assigned city.

Not that Headquarters mattered right now. They couldn’t do anything to them that would compare with the loss of Raul. But the criminals could.

By the time they reached the ground level, Izzy had half a mind to tell Ana this had all been a stupid idea and to somehow convince her that they should head home, concentrate on the disappearance of the Box and leave the investigation of Raul’s disappearance to the Xenosecurity squad in Rio.

She didn’t want to do any of that. She was terrified for Raul, too! Not to mention worried about how Gus was being treated in custody. But they were just floundering around in a panic. They had no idea what was going on, no plan where to go next, no support from anyone who had the equipment to actually gather or analyse evidence. If anything, they might be making matters worse. 

She was still trying to gather her thoughts into a succinct statement, when they left the lift three floors below the ground level and Eiska stopped in her tracks so abruptly that Izzy ran into the back of her legs.

She didn’t even flinch. She just stood there, stock-still with her nose in the air. 

“Did you find it?” asked Ana urgently.

“No,” replied Eiska somewhat hesitantly.

“Then why are we stopping, get back in the lift, let’s go, we need to find him. Go on!”

“It’s not the smell from your brother’s apartment now,” said Eiska in a slow, measured voice. 

“What is it?” asked Izzy, but she knew Eiska’s answer before she heard it. Her face spoke louder than words: “It’s the smell from our lab. It’s the Box. Somewhere around here, really close.”

A shiver ran down Izzy’s spine: “Here?” She’d suspected that the disappearances of the Box and Raul were related, but this was proof - and she would much rather have been wrong. 

The Box belonged in a double-shielded chamber in a research station in the Arctic. Or really, it belonged at the bottom of an ocean on an uninhabited planet, where it couldn’t do any damage. Not in the hands of criminals in a bustling city of millions!

Eiska didn’t respond. Instead she began to sniff her way along one of the walls, nose practically pressed against the smooth material. Fortunately this part of the arcology was almost entirely deserted and the few people skulking about seemed entirely too busy with their own matters - not all of them entirely above-board, Izzy suspected - that they paid no attention whatsoever to Eiska’s odd behaviour. 

After a few minutes, she stopped again, this time in front of a locked panel. 

“I can track it up to here, but then it goes right behind this panel. You think that goes down to the filtration system?”

“Oh God, I hope not,” whispered Izzy, the scope of Eiska’s question rapidly unfolding in front of her eyes. If the Box - or something like it - was anywhere near the filtration system when it went off, the effects might not just hit a level or two. This entire fucking arcology, a sizable part of a global metropolis, would fall victim to a vicious madness within the few seconds it would take for the Box’s effects to spread through the system. And they were no closer to figuring out how those effects even worked than when they had first received the Box, so there was no counteracting them. 

While Izzy was trying to stave off the rising panic, Ana was pacing back and forth in front of the locked panel like a caged animal. Finally, she punched the panel in frustration and shouted: “Fucking shit!”

“Can’t you make them unlock the panel for you?” pleaded Eiska, “You’ve got the authority, right?”

“What do you want me to do? Just strongarm them into doing what I want ‘cause I’m wearing a pretty uniform? You know there’s laws to stop us from doing that and anyone in any position of authority knows that, too. I can’t do jackshit without a warrant. We’re fucking stuck. Raul might be down there and we’re fucking stuck.”

“Call Xenosecurity then, let them know what we suspect,” suggested Eiska quietly, but Izzy didn’t hear Ana’s response. She had begun to scan the wall for a smaller panel. The arcologies were all set up the same way, weren’t they? So it had to be somewhere right … around … here …

Bingo!

“Don’t call them just yet. If I’m right, we can get through there, no problem.” She pulled out the multitool she always carried in her pocket and began fiddling with the screws that held the small panel in place.

“Urgh, these are tight! Eiska, would you help me pry this off?”

With help from Eiska’s superior strength, the panel was off in no time, revealing a keypad and a tangle of wires. Izzy smiled at the familiar sight.

Ana was peeking over Izzy’s shoulder now to see what was going on. She furrowed her brow: “I know you’re good with gadgets and everything, Izzy, but do you really think this is a good idea? If you fuck around with the code and set off some kind of alarm…”

“I’m not going to. The security on these things is shit,” said Izzy. “And it doesn’t look like they’ve changed it in years,” she added, hoping her impression was right.

A few seconds of fiddling with wires later and she had her confirmation. The large panel slid open, revealing the door of a lift much less shiny and nice than the others they had used today. A little more manoeuvring and the lift door slid open.

“Nice!” cheered Eiska.

“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” asked Ana with a suspicious frown.

“Yeah, lots of times,” admitted Izzy. “Back when you were busy with your training, we were constantly sneaking around the bowels of the arcology, Raul, Mat-...” Izzy saw Ana’s face and fell silent. “Nevermind. We’re wasting time.”

Without another word, she entered the lift.

 

* * *

Izzy had expected this place to be eerie **.** She remembered hours spent in dimly lit hallways just like these, sneaking out of the back of the Bureau’s labs, already well hidden from the public eye, and making their way through the maintenance corridors, revelling in the fear of being found out, a pleasant shiver running down her back every time they heard an unexpected noise and the relieved laughter when it turned out to be just another maintenance bot after all. But there was no revelling now, no relief. Now getting caught wasn’t about getting a stern lecture and some extra chores, this was about their very lives and sanity and suddenly the fear felt nowhere near as fun. 

Izzy could feel a stabbing, cold absence at her back where two impatient yet protective hands had once pushed her along hallways just like these.

They were barely five feet in when Ana, who’d been fiddling nervously with what Izzy assumed was a weapon in her pocket, stopped Eiska and Izzy with a hand sign and made them retreat into a darkened corner.

“You should stay here,” she whispered.

“Excuse me, what?”

“Don’t give me that, Izzy,” hissed Ana. “I’m not trying to baby you, but it might be dangerous down here and neither of you are exactly,” she gave Eiska a very significant look, “built for stealth, you know. You guys wait here, I’ll go further in, check the situation and…”

“And get lost in the hallways without Eiska’s nose,” said Izzy, exasperation in her voice. “Besides, I know how to handle the Box. You don’t. You don’t want to find Raul and then end up maiming him!”

“Alright, alright, you can come, but be fucking quiet and follow my lead. And if I tell you to get out, you get the hell out! I’m here to save my brother, not lose my best friend, alright?”

Izzy nodded. “I’ll be careful. You’re not losing me.”

“And you…” Ana pointed at Eiska.

“I’ll be quiet as a mouse,” said Eiska, with the slight smirk she usually had on her face whenever she used an English idiom.

“You’re not taking this seriously! If you fuck around and get Raul killed…”

“We won’t,” Izzy cut her off. “It won’t happen. We’ll be fine. Let’s move.”

“You’re right. Let’s move.”

They continued on their way through the stillness, Eiska in the lead with Ana’s hand on her back to stop her at a moment’s notice and Izzy bringing up the rear, wondering why she’d never noticed how badly her wheels needed greasing. She might as well have sent Raul’s kidnappers a formal announcement of their imminent arrival - there was no way they could miss the constant squeaking and creaking she made with even the slightest movement.

Maybe she really ought to have stayed outside. But there was no way in hell she could let Ana run off on her own! What if something had happened to Raul down here? If Ana found her brother in danger or injured or - a cold shudder ran down Izzy’s back at the thought - worse, she was sure to lose her head. And if Eiska was right, if the Box really was here, they needed to keep their cool above all else. 

Izzy wasn’t at all sure she would be capable of doing that herself, though. Her heart was thumping so loudly it was nearly drowning out the squeaking of her wheels. If she came face to face with Raul’s kidnappers, she would probably faint dead away.

Just as she thought this, a high-pitched scream echoed through the hallway, making her flinch hard. Eiska halted in her tracks, eyes wide with fear. And Ana gasped in a low voice: “Raul!” and started forward.

Izzy reacted just in time to grab her awkwardly by the hip, the only part of her she could reach. Ana whirled around.

“Be careful, damn it!” Izzy hissed.  


Ana looked confused for a moment, then shook her head, as if to physically shake off her stupor, and nodded silently.

As Eiska began to walk again, Ana threw out her arm to stop her. There was another scream, more drawn out this time. Izzy’s stomach turned. She’d heard those screams before, desperate, tortured screams. Raul’s meltdowns had never been pleasant to anyone involved, but it was worse now, those screams being torn from a grown man’s throat by God knows what and none of his family there to help him, soothe him, make the pain go away…

When Izzy looked up at Ana, she saw her friend had pulled her gun. With a practiced gesture, she directed Eiska and Izzy to follow her. 

They moved through the hallways at the swiftest pace they could manage. Ana was now in the lead, practically flying, following her brother’s screams without hesitating for a moment to find her way. Izzy had long lost any sense of direction and even Eiska, who had her nose to guide her, looked left and right with uncertainty every time they ran past a turn-off. But Ana kept on running.

From one moment to the other, she skidded to a halt by a door. It was slightly ajar, letting a ray of light from the inside escape into the dimness surrounding them. Izzy could hear rustling and creaking and several excited voices behind the door. Another loud scream told them they had found Raul.

Ana had her gun at the ready and was just about to throw open the door, when Izzy grabbed her by the arm just in time and shook her head.

“What?” mouthed Ana angrily.

Izzy held up a hand as a signal to wait and looked around to get her bearings. She hoped she’d find what she was looking for, because if one more scream came from that room over there, she didn’t think that even the combined force of her and Eiska could stop Ana from barging in there and getting herself killed. 

“Don’t move!” she mouthed, hoping Ana was not too far gone to listen, and began dragging her right hand along the wall as she pulled herself along. A few seconds later her fingers touched the telltale seam of a panel that was slightly offset from the rest of the wall. 

She pried the panel open and - with a silent prayer to whoever would listen that this system was truly identical to that of the arcology she had grown up in - she began to fiddle with the wires. 

Seconds later, a small door slid open near the floor, making a noise barely any louder than the sigh of relief that escaped from Izzy’s own throat. A maintenance bot whose programming clearly expected that door to be closed shot past Izzy into the hallway and trundled confusedly off into the distance.

Izzy was just about to wave her companions over, but they were already next to her, giving her perplexed looks.

“We’ll go around,” whispered Izzy. “Catch them unawares! They might be guarding the door but they’ve probably forgotten about the maintenance shafts and we can get out the other end.”

“I’ll never fit,” whispered Eiska, looking doubtfully at the small entrance.

“You two stay out here then,” breathed Ana, “make yourselves scarce, keep out of sight.”

“Fuck off, Ana! I’m going in, you need me for the Box,” said Izzy as she slid out of her chair and, ignoring Eiska’s gasp of “But Chief…” pulled herself into the small tunnel.

“Hide my chair, Eiska!”

Ana immediately squeezed herself into the tunnel next to Izzy. It was just wide enough for both of them to crawl next to each other. And luckily for Izzy! Her arms were already aching from the exertion of dragging her uncooperative legs along. She’d gotten weak these past years, damn it! 

But they were barely inside the tunnel when Ana grabbed her around the waist with one arm and began pulling her along. She could practically hear the voice inside her memories scoffing ‘Get a move on, slowpoke!’ But it wasn’t Ana’s voice. Ana hadn’t been there …

She was now, though, and she was dragging Izzy so hard her shirt nearly slid off. They had to fight off a couple of maintenance bots, who tried very hard to brush away the ‘obstruction’ in their path. But a few swats made short work of them and they scuttled up the wall to continue their work behind the backs of the two women, both of whom were trying very hard not to breathe too loudly.

They couldn’t hear the screams now, but the voices were becoming clearer by the second. 

“... don’t make things difficult, Doctor.”

Izzy frowned. She knew that voice, but the face that went with it was just out of reach, taunting her.

“You don’t want to die down here, do you?” A different voice now, a woman’s, one she didn’t know.

“Eh, maybe you do, but it’ll be a hell of a long time before we let you. Are you sure you want to keep being stubborn?” That damn voice again! 

They were right by the room now, peeking out through the slots in the panel on the other side of the shaft, but all they could see were fucking legs! Five pairs of them. One of them was in a chair, flanked by two other people, the other two pairs of legs were standing a little off to the side. God damn it! She  _ knew _ the owner of that voice, but she couldn’t exactly identify him by his shoes, could she now?

Next to her, Ana was carefully angling her gun, readying herself to burst out of the maintenance shaft and rain down hell on the bastards who had kidnapped her brother the very second the opportunity presented itself.

“Listen, you don’t even have to make an effort. We’ve done all the work for you.”

And now there was another voice. She didn’t know this one, but she could tell whose it was, because it wasn’t a person talking. It was the voice of a text-to-speech program used by someone who had clearly never done so before. They weren’t placing any of the accents, making the voice sound droning and monotone. Raul had changed his voice since they had last talked, but this was definitely Raul’s current voice, Izzy would have bet on it. Except there was no way in hell it was Raul speaking. Because there was no way in hell that Raul would have ever said:

“...  The secret council of extraterrestrials has decided that humanity is a threat and must be exterminated. And they have convinced me of their cause.”

“All you have to do,” the familiar voice said, “is walk into that meeting with the Box and we’ll do the rest.”

For a moment there was silence. Then Raul’s voice spoke and this time it really was Raul in all his glory, with all the emphasis the software could muster right where it belonged: “Only a complete _ fucking _ imbecile would ever believe your bullshit!”

“Ah, even if only the complete fucking imbeciles believe us,” the woman’s voice responded, “that’s plenty of people. More than enough to push the powers that be in the right direction…”

“... and finally get these unnatural fucks off our planet! It’s time we take back what’s ours!” the familiar voice chimed in. Izzy was racking her brain so hard her head was beginning to ache. The voice reminded her of the lab, somehow, of fiddling with mechanisms and chemicals no human before her had ever seen…

“And about time, too,” the voice said and Izzy very nearly gasped. Drew! Fucking Drew! What the hell was  _ he _ doing here?

Fuck! It made sense! No wonder that Xenosecurity hadn’t found any signs of a breach. There hadn’t been one! Drew had full access to the lab and all its contents! He’d stayed behind after everyone had left and had simply sauntered out the door with the Box! And when some guards had tried to stop him to ask what the hell he was thinking, he’d knocked them out cold. A dozen of the chemicals he had daily access to would have done the trick!

But no, none of this made any sense at all! Drew had been working side by side with extraterrestrials for years! The Bureau did extensive background checks on everyone they employed! And here he was, planning a conspiracy born from pure xenophobia, willing to hurt extraterrestrials, hurt humans, hurt  _ Raul _ …

Izzy felt the pressure of Ana’s hand on her shoulder. Her friend had noticed that something was wrong, but there was no way Izzy could let her know what was happening without giving them away. 

“It doesn’t matter,” said Raul. “I won’t do it. Why would I? I’ll die either way!”

“Ah, you don’t know that,” said the unknown voice. “You might well survive and recover. Eventually. A few years down the line.”

“Whereas,” said Drew, “you will definitely die if you don’t do as we say. But not for quite a while. We don’t give up easily and we’ve got all the time in the world. Nobody’s coming down here to save you. Well, let’s get back to it then, shall we?”

There was some rustling above them and Ana’s grip on Izzy’s shoulder tightened painfully. Izzy had stopped breathing. Any moment now Raul would scream again…

But the scream didn’t come. Instead, another man’s voice chimed in to say: “Boss, he doesn’t look so good. We ought to give him a break to think things over...”

A cold shiver raced down Izzy’s spine, making the hair on her back of her neck stand on end. 

She knew that voice, too! She hadn’t heard it in fifteen years, but even if it had been fifty, she would have recognised it anywhere. Ana’s hand let go of Izzy’s shoulder and dropped limply to her side. She had recognised him, too. She stared at Izzy with eyes wide open and a single word escaped her mouth, a gasp, tinged with disbelief and hope and fear: “Matteo!”

There was a clatter just outside the maintenance duct and Drew hissed: “Shut up!”

“But boss, if he dies we won’t have a way to get into that meeting!”

“SHUT UP, IDIOT! I heard something.”

“A maintenance bot?” asked the woman.

“Maintenance bots don’t talk.”

“You think someone’s down here? But everything’s locked down and empty today, Adelaide made sure…”

“It came from down there!”

They had no time to flee, no time to attack, no time to act at all. Before they could move a muscle, the panel hiding them from view was gone and there they were, face to face with the muzzles of two guns.

“Drop it!” ordered a harsh voice and Ana complied. 

They were pulled out into the brightly lit room and the whole picture was revealed to them: Raul, one arm wrapped in a blood-stained bandage and handcuffed to the chair he was sitting on, looking pale and terrified, free hand tapping a rapid rhythm on the datapad on his lap, feet tapping along under the chair so hard that the entire chair shook. Drew by his side, holding him down by the shoulder, aiming what Izzy recognised as a taser at Raul’s side, leaving little doubt as to what Raul had been going through in the past hours. 

Izzy’s heart jumped when she saw the familiar cube lying by Drew’s feet. Eiska’s nose hadn’t been mistaken.

The others in the room were hiding their faces behind masks. Ana and Izzy were on their knees on the floor, being held at gunpoint by one masked assailant each, and they barely had time to take a breath before three more masked mooks dragged in Eiska who snarled as they shoved her roughly to the ground.

“Look what we found outside.”

“Fucking hell, the circus bear, too?” exclaimed Drew. “You brought the whole fucking department then, Chief?” The moniker was dripping with venom.

Izzy didn’t answer.

“Any others outside?”

“No, they’re alone, boss.”

“You checked the cameras?”

But Izzy didn’t hear the man’s answer nor did she much care. Her eyes were glued to someone else, the man standing off to the side, gun dangling limply in his right hand, his eyes under his balaclava so wide that he looked like the character of a children’s cartoon. He was staring right at them.

He opened his mouth and a tiny, trembling voice escaped: “I-izzy? Ana? Is it ... ? But …?”

Slowly he reached up to pull off his balaclava. And there it was, the messy hair, the bronzed skin, the brown eyes once full of laughter, now slowly filling with tears, older now, but unmistakably the face that had haunted her dreams for years…

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, idiot?” growled Drew.

“The fuck, you know them?” whispered the woman.

Raul reached for his datapad with his free hand and said: “I knew it was you, Matteo. The whole time.” 

Drew said something and the woman and one of the masked men responded. But their voices sounded like static to Izzy. She couldn’t understand a word and she didn’t care. She just sat on the ground, unmoving, staring up at Matteo’s face, trying her hardest not to blink, because maybe it was all a dream and he would disappear, if she looked away for even one second. In that moment, all she wanted to do was pull herself to her feet and tackle him in the tightest hug she had ever given another person.

But she didn’t move. And neither did he.

“I - I thought you were still in London…” he breathed.

And just like that, the spell was broken.

“Yeah, we fucking were in London, until some waste of space kidnapped my baby brother!” screamed Ana. “What the fuck are  _ you _ doing …  _ here ? _   With  _ them? _ …” Her eyes darted to her brother’s arm. “You hurt him. You fucking hurt him.”

“I didn’t  _ touch _ him!” screamed Matteo. “I didn’t want him to be hurt. I had no idea they were talking about Raul when they mentioned the alien expert we needed!” Matteo turned to Raul. “I swear, I never wanted this to happen! You’ve gotta believe me!”

“Then why the fuck are you down here?” screamed Ana. “Why are you helping these - these - TERRORISTS?”

“Yeah, I would like to know that, too, actually,” said Izzy, surprised by how firm her voice was. Slowly the fear and surprise were being swept away by freezing cold anger.

They had looked for him for so long, scouring city after city. The had put out feelers to people they had long left behind - and left behind for good reason - just in case he had turned up back home. For a year, Izzy, Ana and Raul had run themselves ragged, spending their precious few free moments trying somehow to locate him, to bring him back, at least to make sure he was alive and safe. When they’d finally realised he wasn't coming back and their search was a waste of time, it had very nearly destroyed all three of them. He had no right, not the slightest fucking right, to turn up here and now of all places.

“Terrorists?” asked Matteo, his eyes growing even wider. “It’s not like we had a choice! Someone had to do something! Take back what’s ours! Before they…” he waved his free hand vaguely in the direction of Eiska, who was still kneeling on the ground, growling softly, “destroy everything!”

Eiska’s head snapped up. “Destroy?” she asked angrily. “But who’s destroying anything? We’re just here to mingle! To research!” 

Her gaze wandered over to Drew. She was staring at him in utter disbelief, the pain so clear in her face Izzy could practically feel it cutting her up inside. She was waiting for him to say something. Anything. To explain.

And he did: “Ha, listen to it! Like they haven’t already fucked up our world beyond recognition! People want you to leave, but of course the powers that be only listen to those alien lovers at the Bureau!”

“What the fuck, Drew?” Izzy felt tears rise to her eyes. “You’ve been working with extraterrestrials for years!”

“And I hated every single second of it,” growled Drew. “Acting like they’re so fucking superior! Enough is enough!”

“And that’s why you decided to torture my baby brother?” screamed Ana. “Because you hated your fucking job? How pathetic are you? Nobody was forcing you to work for the Bureau! You could have left anytime you pleased!”

“And be stuck in a world full of these things,” he spat, pointing at Eiska, “without even knowing what they’re capable of! You lot  _ want _ us to be completely defenseless! But we’re not! We’re fucking not!” He bent down to grab the Box off the floor. “And we’re going to show you!”

Izzy couldn’t hold back a panicked shriek. “DREW! NO!”

He gave her a cold smile: “What is it, Chief? Feeling like listening to the Human members of your team all of the sudden?”

“What are you talking about?” screamed Izzy. “I listen to  _ everyone _ on my team!”

Drew snorted. 

“Come on! Be reasonable! You’ve seen what the Box can do! Are you really willing to release that on innocent people just because …” Izzy didn’t know how to continue. Because what? Where the hell was all this hatred coming from? Fear? Jealousy? She could just about understand why the people who’d never actually talked to a non-Human before were afraid of them, but how the hell did someone who’d been working and communicating with dozens of extraterrestrials, each of them their own person, for years and years just up and decide they were all monsters and needed to be driven off the planet?

“We just want things to go back the way they used to be,” said Matteo. “Don’t you see?” 

It stung just how much he sounded exactly like the boy Izzy had known, defiantly refusing to admit that he was wrong. But the boy Izzy had known would have seen what was in front of his eyes and he would have broken down and apologised. Matteo didn’t. He simply fell silent.

“Someone had to do something,” said the woman, loathing in her voice. “There was no other way.”

“You are completely fucked in the head, the lot of you,” said Ana.

“They have no business being on this planet in the first place. This is  _ our _ planet! It belongs to Humans! You’re just too damn brainwashed to realise! Of course you would be. The Bureau tore you away from your home when you were children!”

“Tore us …” started Ana, then turned to face Matteo. Her face had gone stark white with anger. “Is that what you told them, you ungrateful fuck?”

Matteo nodded, his face now more set than it had been since he’d pulled off the ski mask. 

“Because it’s the truth! They just decided to take us! Didn’t even care…”

“Didn’t even care about WHAT exactly? They cared more than anyone else in our lives ever had and you know it! They saved us! They gave us an education! They could have given you everything, Matteo! Everything! But you threw it all away!”

Izzy had never seen Matteo snarl like he was now. Like a rabid dog.

“Everything!” he spat. “I didn’t  _ want _ everything! I wanted to go home! I wanted things to go back to the way they’d been before … before …” Matteo turned to Raul.

Raul reached for his datapad again: “I’m sorry.”

For a moment, Matteo seemed confused. His eyes flitted back and forth between Ana and Izzy on the ground and Raul on the chair.

“You don’t have to … it’s me who … you couldn’t have … God, Raul, you were only a little kid.” He seemed to have caught himself again and his face was once again stern as he turned to Ana and Izzy: “We were all little kids! They just decided we’d be useful and took us! Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to go. At least you got a choice!”

“Choice?” shrieked Ana and laughed bitterly. “Oh, go fuck yourself, Matteo! You were there when our grandmother literally  _ sold _ us! And it was the best damn thing that ever happened to us! If the Bureau hadn’t taken us away, we’d still be rotting in that slum! You wouldn’t even know how to read, arsehole!”

“Oh,  _ you  _ would say that, you’re part of the New World Order Enforcement Squad these days, aren’t you? You don’t give a shit about me, ‘cause I don’t have wings or fur or two fucking heads!”

Izzy couldn’t hold back the gasp. “Matteo! What the hell! Are you even listening to yourself?”

Matteo’s glance lingered on her for a long, silent moment. There was a sad look in his eyes. He shook his head: “Why do any of you even care that I left?”

“Why do we … what are you … what the fuck?” stammered Izzy. She could barely even comprehend the question.

“Yeah, why do you care? It’s not like anyone needed me back there. The Bureau didn’t need me. You sure as hell didn’t need me, Izzy, not now that you’ve got a proper wheelchair and shit…”

Izzy couldn’t believe what she was hearing. It took her a moment to wrench her jaw closed so she could actually speak and when she did, she noticed her voice was wavering with anger and disbelief: “What the everloving fuck are you talking about? Do you think I was friends with you just because you were so great at lugging my gimpy ass around?”

Matteo gaped at her.

“It was never about  _ needing _ you, Matteo! We  _ wanted  _ you! Do you know how hard we tried to find you? Ana and Raul even went back to talk to their grandmother, just in case you’d gone back home. Just in case someone in the neighbourhood knew something and maybe they’d mentioned it to her. Raul barely even left his bed for a month after that!”

“I’m okay,” Raul piped up.

“Yeah, we’re okay  _ now _ !  _ Okay _ , not good. Do you know how long it took for us to get to  _ okay _ after you just decided to flip your lid and walk out on us?”

Izzy tried her best to stop the tears from welling up in her eyes. If she was going to die down here, she wanted to go out growling and screaming insults, not bawling like an abandoned child. But she was sobbing before she could even get another word out. Too strong were the memories of those months after they had given up their search. 

Raul refusing to eat anything until he ended up in hospital with a feeding tube down his nose, because he didn’t think he deserved food. The way he’d asked for a reassignment soon after, because he couldn’t stand being in the same room as Izzy.

Ana acting like everything was fine, then calling up at 3 a.m. from some training assignment, absolutely frantic because she’d dreamt that Izzy had disappeared and had forgotten not every single one of her nightmares was real. Finally breaking down after too many glasses of wine one evening, screaming about how Matteo was probably dead and it was all her fault and if she’d only been there, if she’d refused to join Xenosecurity, if she’d argued harder for joining the research teams like her friends, then she would have been there in the dormitory that night and maybe she could have talked him out of leaving.

And she, Izzy, on the edge of that balcony, dragging herself out of her chair and across the railing, hanging there, staring down into the abyss until she was close to passing out from the blood pooling in her head, thinking about how with just one little shove she would never again have to live in a world where the only person she had thought would always be there had just abandoned her without a second thought. 

To this day she didn’t know if she would have done it, if Ana hadn’t shown up, grabbed her by the legs and dragged her to safety, swearing profusely all the while and cursing the arcology’s architect for making every last fucking bit of the place accessible to wheelchair users.

But Matteo didn’t deserve to know any of this. He’d left without looking back! He didn’t care! And now he’d gone and joined some bigoted fuckwads who were willing to torture and kill and risk the utter destruction of hundreds and hundreds of people in some harebrained scheme to drive out extraterrestrials. Extraterrestrials like Gus, who unlike Matteo, hadn’t left Raul and was probably a good part of the reason why Raul was even around to be kidnapped in the first place. Extraterrestrials like Eiska, who was by far the kindest soul Izzy had ever met.

And it burst out of Izzy in an explosion of fury: “You fucking traitor, the extraterrestrials you hate so much have been better fucking friends than you.” And then, out of breath and sobbing she added without meaning to, without wanting to: “We missed you, you asshole!”

Matteo just stood there for a moment and stared, mouth open, then he began to stammer: “I … I didn’t know … I thought …” 

“Well, this is all very touching,” interrupted Drew, walking toward the spot where Ana and Izzy were cowering, guns still trained on them. “But we have business to be getting on with. It should be a lot easier to convince our dear Doctor Alves to cooperate, now that we have his nearest and dearest here with us.”

Izzy gasped. She hadn’t considered that at all. They’d had to go easy on Raul, they still needed him. Ana, Eiska and her, though …

“But … are you saying …” stammered Matteo, looking back and forth between his former friends and Drew.

“If you can’t handle it, go guard the hallway instead,” said the woman, “you’re being useless and wasting our time!”

Drew cleared his throat: “Now…”

He lifted the taser, pointed it in turn at Izzy, Ana and Eiska, then finally settled on Ana and turned towards Raul. 

“So, I’m going to ask you again, Doctor Alves, are you going to help us or not?” asked Drew, in a tone so deliberately pleasant that it made Izzy nauseous.

“Oh go fuck yourself, you third-rate comic book villain!” Ana shouted before Raul had a chance to answer. “So what, you’re gonna torture us a bit, so Raul sets off that fucking box around a bunch of people your insignificant asses could never get close to, you blame it on the evil alien conspiracy and what? What then, huh? What do you think will happen? They’re all just going to disappear in a puff of xenophobic bigotry?” 

“Shut up!” growled Drew.

“I thought you had to be smart to be a Xenoengineer!”

Izzy wanted desperately to tell Ana to be quiet. They still had multiple guns pointed at them and any moment now Drew would pull the trigger on that taser he was holding and Ana would be in horrible agony, floors below where anyone could hear her scream. Izzy didn’t know how the hell they were ever going to get out of here, but insulting their captors wasn’t going to do them any favours. And yet, Ana showed no sign of stopping.

“You’re not just bigoted terrorist fucks. You’re not even  _ good _ at being bigoted terrorist fucks! I can think of a million ways to start the interstellar war you want so desperately that are more likely to work than your little shitshow down here! How the hell did you ever convince anyone to follow you?”

“You shouldn’t…” whispered Eiska, but Ana was beyond listening.

“How many of you are there anyway? I bet this isn’t some grand international conspiracy. I bet it’s literally just you lot. A Xenoengineer gone mad, a few building maintenance people to get you your own secret lair and a couple of chumps you paid off to watch the doors for you. And you think  _ you _ somehow represent humanity.” Ana laughed bitterly. “Talk about delusions of grandeur!”

“Shut up!” shouted Drew again, but his face showed all too clearly that Ana had hit a nerve. 

“You did pay them off, didn’t you? I’d bet my ass most of the people here right now don’t give two shits about your glorious All Human planet!”

Ana turned her head to the men still pointing their guns at them and smirked: “Did he ever even tell you what you were getting into?”

“Shut the fuck up!” screamed Drew and waved the taser threateningly, but Ana’s comments had riled him up so much he seemed to have forgotten he could actually pull the trigger. Ana spoke on unimpeded: “Did he ever actually tell you that he has no fucking clue how to work that pretty little gadget over there? Did he tell you it could go off any second and turn every last one of us into a vegetable? Permanently!” 

Ana paused for a moment, then added, almost casually: “Not just us, probably. The arcology’s air and water and everything all runs through here, doesn’t it? It’ll fuck up everyone on the floors above us, too. Did you tell them that, Drew, huh? Did you tell them bringing that thing in here would put their families and friends at risk?”

There was uncertainty in the eyes behind the ski masks. The muzzles of guns were lowered - almost imperceptibly so, but Ana had noticed it, too. She exchanged a meaningful glance with Izzy. Izzy didn’t think anyone else had realised, but Ana was quite obviously scanning the room for weaknesses and Izzy didn’t like it at all. A shoot-out in such a confined space … and with the Box sitting right there, ready to have its defense mechanism triggered by a stray bullet…

Matteo, meanwhile, kept wiping the sweat off his uncharacteristically pale face with a trembling hand.

“Boss?” he finally whispered, staring at the Box. “You said … you said everyone would be fine … in the end.”

“She’s lying!” barked Drew.

“No, she’s not,” Izzy burst out, surprising herself with her own courage.

“We never managed to figure out the mechanism…” began Eiska, but Drew cut her off with a roar: “And what would you know, alien? Maybe you’re not as superior as you think you are! Maybe I figured it out before you!”

There was a brief silence, as Drew, gun in hand, stared Eiska down, cold fury in his eyes. But his men behind her were shuffling uncomfortably and throwing glances at the Box at Drew’s feet. 

And suddenly Raul’s voice piped up from behind Drew’s back: “It’s unlikely you figured it out on your own. This is a highly complex mechanism of unknown provenance. You would’ve needed too many of the Bureau’s resources for it to remain a secret that…”

With a scream, Drew snapped out of his stupor, swiped Raul’s datapad to the floor where its screen shattered with a loud crack and turned the taser on Ana.

She gave him a look of utter disdain. “Congratulations, how very helpful! I hope you feel better now.”

Then she turned to Raul, who was shaking harder than ever in the chair. The soft tapping rhythm of his hand on his lap had turned to a painful pounding and his mouth had opened under the pressure of a scream that he was only just managing to hold back.

“It’ll be okay, Raul. It’ll be alright. You just hold on and…”

Unnoticed by the men who were supposed to be guarding them, she was slowly beginning to scoot forward, inch by inch, toward her brother. 

Drew, however, noticed. And pulled the trigger.

For a split second there was complete and utter pandemonium. Izzy screamed “Stop!” but she couldn’t hear her own voice over the pained screams of Ana and Raul and the protests of Eiska … and Matteo?

Izzy pulled herself along the ground toward Ana, but someone stepped on her legs. She lost her balance and her chin slammed to the floor with a thud. The pain was so sharp she felt her stomach heave - or was it the taste of blood suddenly spreading in her mouth? Had she knocked out a tooth?

No matter, she had to get to Ana, had to push her out of the way, to safety, had to … but Ana wasn’t screaming anymore, she was huddled on the floor trying to recover. The screams were just Raul’s now. And someone else’s, someone who had just burst in the door and who wasn’t screaming incoherently like Izzy had thought at first. No, there were words, but the ringing in her head was making it hard to distinguish them.

But finally, finally the words were beginning to make sense and when they had finally taken form in Izzy’s brain, her whole body felt so light with relief that she thought she might just float away: “Boss, there’s people outside! Cops! They know we’re here!”

Drew’s face fell, boiling anger giving way to bafflement and confusion. 

“But…”

For a moment he looked utterly helpless as his eyes flitted around the room, trying to find some way of escape, but then his gaze suddenly locked in on something that Izzy couldn’t see from where she was lying.

His face set and determined, he said: “No matter. They won’t ever make it all the way here.” 

He took out his gun, turned away from Ana’s crumpled form and toward something else on the ground. 

It was Eiska’s booming “DREW! NO!” that finally connected the dots in Izzy’s mind. A shiver, as strong as if she’d been tased herself, ran down her spine. He couldn’t! He wouldn’t!

Drew stepped up to Raul, who was still screaming and thrashing and beating himself against every part of his body he could reach. Drew bent down and unlocked his shackles 

With a smile on his face that made Izzy’s breath hitch in her throat, he looked down at Raul and said: “It doesn’t matter. We have no paper trail. When help comes, all the evidence they’re going to find in this entire arcology is crazy people and a broken datapad saying the aliens made him do it. It’s not quite a presidential meeting, of course, but it should do the trick.”

Izzy saw him aim the gun at the ground, saw his finger push the trigger, heard her own shriek of fear and for a moment everything seemed to stand still, as if it had all been caught in mid-air by some unknowable force. Then it all came crashing down at once. Screams and cries and cursing and noises so harsh and loud that all she wanted to do was poke her eardrums out, but the screams were coming from inside her head, from her own throat and maybe this was madness. He’d done it, he’d really done it, he’d set off the Box with the gunshot she’d heard … but what of the second shot … and if she was mad, why the hell was everything still so clear in her mind? 

Izzy didn’t want to look. But she had to know! Slowly, inch by inch, she pushed herself up from the floor until she could see. 

Her eyes fell immediately on the Box lying exactly where it had been before. A deep crimson liquid was pouring from it, forming a puddle beneath its sharp angles. But no, of course the Box was not bleeding! It was an apparatus, a mechanism, a device, unknown and terrifying, but a  _ thing  _ nevertheless and things didn’t bleed, did they? Izzy tore her eyes away from the Box and tracked the pouring rivulet to its source. It was Drew.

He was lying, face down on the ground. From the looks of it, a bullet had torn apart his throat. His own gun was still clutched in his hand, but it must have been knocked off target when he’d been hit. He’d fired off a shot, but that shot had not connected with the Box. The gun was pointed right at where Raul had been sitting a second ago. Except Izzy couldn’t see Raul. All she could see was another lifeless bleeding heap nearby, wrapped tight around a scream of agony made flesh.

Izzy’s mouth began to form words before her mind had made sense of the muddle of crimson and grey before her. In the end, her own words brought the horrifying clarity: “Ana! No, no, no, Ana, no, please, no…” 

Ana had made it to her brother just in time for the stray bullet to hit her.

Izzy wanted to crawl toward her friend, but something was rooting her to the spot. Somewhere, in the back of her mind, beneath grief and despair, there was a brief moment of wonder at the other voice that was echoing her own so very closely.

It was Matteo, standing alone, paralysed, his gun still aimed at the exact spot where Drew had stood a second before, his arms trembling violently, his head shaking, his mouth muttering the word “No” over and over again as though he could make it all unhappen, if he just demanded it hard enough.

“Ana,” he screamed. “No, no, I didn’t mean … I didn’t want … oh God…” Tears were streaming down his face. Izzy was surprised to feel that her own eyes were entirely dry as they met his. He fell silent as he returned her gaze. Then he closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

“All I wanted,” he said, his voice no longer trembling now, but so steady it was terrifying, and Izzy knew he was speaking to her and her alone, that there wasn’t even anyone else in the room now, that maybe there’d never been anyone else in the world, “was for everything to go back to the way it used to be.” He looked down at the spot where Ana and Raul lay, Ana a broken body, Raul’s voice now so hoarse that it was barely audible.

“It’s never going to be, is it? Even if they leave. Even if the Bureau closes. It’s never, ever going to be.” 

Izzy watched, unable to move, unable to act, as Matteo raised the gun to his temple. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispered…

… and pulled the trigger…

Or at least he would have, if he hadn’t, at that very moment, been buried under five-hundred pounds of fur and muscle holding him down with a scolding: “NO!”

Izzy barely even heard the door bursting open and the shouts of “GET ON THE FLOOR!” All she could do was stare at the face of Matteo, half-smothered underneath Eiska. Alive.


	3. Chapter 3

When she came to, Izzy didn’t have a clue where she was or when she had passed out. But her eyes were far too heavy to open now, so all she could do was listen. Eiska’s gentle rumble reached her ears, from far away, then closer, then far away again: “It’s a miracle you turned up. We might not have been so lucky…”

“Oh, luck my ass,” answered an unfamiliar voice, right next to her. “We got a call from Commander Alves the moment she confirmed the location of the terrorists. We basically got a live audio feed of the whole bloody mess!”

“So she  _ does _ know what she’s doing then.”

Does. Present tense.

“Debatable. We should probably be arresting the lot of you for sheer reckless stupidity. Commander Alves will certainly be asked to explain herself when she wakes up and I assume Headquarters will be having words with you, too.”

Silence. Then…

“So you think they’ll be fine?”

“Huh?”

“The Alveses! They’re going to make it?”

“Don’t know what you’re asking me for.” 

A pause.

“Look, I don’t know what to tell you, they’ve got Dr. Alves on so many sedatives they would’ve knocked  _ you _ out three times over and the Commander won’t be out of surgery for hours. We can’t do anything right now.  _ You’ve _ done more than enough already, anyway. Please. Sit. Your pacing is beyond irritating.”

Another pause.

“And it’s waking up the patients!”

“Huh? … Chief!”

Something huge, soft and warm landed on Izzy’s shoulder. 

“Hey Eiska,” mumbled Izzy, without opening her eyes.

“God, I’m glad to hear you talk!”

“Wait, why?”

“Well, you sort of went a bit … kind of …”

“Catatonic,” provided the stranger helpfully. “Completely unresponsive, just staring at thin air. For a moment there we were worried the terrorists had figured out how to microtarget project H-83.”

“I thought I’d just passed out...”

“No, you’ve only been asleep for an hour or so,” said Eiska.

Izzy tried to remember, but only succeeded in giving herself a headache. Unsure how to respond, she merely said “Oh”.

Fortunately, Eiska was more than willing to fill the silence: “I brought your chair! Went back down for it! They didn’t want to let me at first but…”

“She insisted rather strongly,” said the stranger, disapproval thick in his voice.

“Thanks, Eiska, I really appreciate it.” 

“No problem, Chief,” said Eiska and gave Izzy’s shoulder a squeeze. 

Izzy sat up slightly and slowly opened her eyes. It took her a moment to find her bearings in her new surroundings. Everything was so bright she would’ve preferred to close her eyes again and the scowling Xenosecurity officer standing next to her bed wasn’t exactly adding to the decor either. 

At least Eiska was there, smiling down at her, though her smile was so strained that she looked more like she was bearing her teeth. The image of her sitting on Matteo flashed through Izzy’s mind. She’d been bearing her teeth then, too. 

“What…” Izzy began and then didn’t know how to continue. She had so many questions, none of which she wanted to ask in front of the glowering uniform still staring down at her. But she had to know. “... happened to…”

“Project H-83 is in our custody. It has been taken to a safe place. Fortunately we…”

But Eiska looked at the man with such utter disapproval that he never finished his sentence, then she turned back around and gave Izzy another squeeze.

“You don’t care about that, do you?”

Izzy shook her head, surprising even herself. She’d never expected that anything would make the fate of the Box feel so irrelevant to her. But here she was...

Eiska gave her a long, hard look, then sighed as her shoulders slumped: “He’s alright. Well, not alright, really. I…” she turned away from Izzy to look down at her feet, “may have broken his arm and a few of his ribs when I pushed him down.”

“But he’s alive, right?” said Izzy, shooting up straight in her bed.

Eiska nodded. Behind her, the Xenosecurity man scoffed, but only a slight twitch in Eiska’s ear betrayed that she had heard him at all. 

“Yeah, they’ve patched him up. He’s in custody now. With all the others, well, except...”

Izzy knew that it was Drew’s name Eiska was swallowing, as she looked down at her with that concerned expression on her face. Eiska probably thought she was feeling guilty, having missed the signs of what Drew was, of what he was planning. She ought to have felt guilty and someday, maybe even today or tomorrow, that guilt would hit her for sure and she would have to deal with it then. But right now there was only room for one thought in her mind.

“Matteo’s alive,” repeated Izzy in her head, sinking back down with a smile.

Behind them, the Xenosecurity officer cleared his throat several times, but Eiska continued to ignore him: “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt him.”

“Hurt him?” Izzy grabbed Eiska by the arm. “You saved him!” She paused. “Eiska?”

“Hm?”

“Why on earth did you save him? After everything…”

“What happened to Ana and her brother wasn’t his fault, you know. And they’ll be alright. They’re in good hands. It’ll all be back to normal soon.”

Izzy shook her head. Back to normal? She didn’t even know what normal was anymore. Her normal, her baseline, had always been them, together. Her life had stopped when Matteo had left. It had been a shock to realise one day that she’d spent more years of her life without him than with him by her side. And then realise it all over again the next day. And the next.

And now he was back, but he’d lived for so long without her, too, and she’d never realised before today - not really, not properly - that his life had stopped long before hers, back when they’d first been taken from the slum. All those years of standing still had turned him into someone she only half-recognised. And here was Eiska, talking about ‘normal’.

“He hates you, Eiska!” 

Eiska rolled her eyes in response: “No, he doesn’t. He doesn’t even know me.”

“You know what I mean. Your people. All extraterrestrials. What he did … what he said …”

“Are you saying I shouldn’t have stopped him?”

“No!” shouted Izzy, flinching at the volume of her own voice. “No, of course not. I just don’t understand why.”

“Chief, you’re practically family!” said Eiska and her grip on Izzy’s arm tightened slightly. “What kind of person would I be if I had the chance to save your brother’s life and didn’t?”

Izzy frowned.

“But he’s not my brother.”

Eiska shook her head and sighed: “It’s not your job to make sure that he gets the punishment he deserves. You get to leave that to the courts, if you want."

Izzy frowned: “Are you saying I should forgive him?”

“I’m not saying you should do anything. Just talk to him. See what he has to say. If you want to.” She gave Izzy a hard look. “Oh, what am I saying? I know you want to! I saw you down in that basement! You’re not that hard to read, Chief! Don’t force yourself to reject your brother for the mistakes he’s made.”

“I…” Matteo’s face popped into Izzy’s mind, gaunt and despairing, staring at the body of Ana, weeping. He’d tried to make things right. He’d stopped Drew. He’d tried to save them. He  _ had _ saved them! If not for him, Drew would have hit the Box rather than Ana and none of them would have ever made it out of that basement.  


But he’d helped kidnap Raul. And he hadn’t stepped in when Drew had tortured him. And Ana might have died down there! And he’d left! He’d just stewed silently in his own misery until it had gotten too much and then he’d left without ever even looking back! He didn’t deserve to have her back. 

And she didn’t deserve to have him back, either - how had she missed all the signs for so many years? She’d been so focused on how much better her own life had become that she’d never even wondered whether all of her friends truly felt the same way.

So they didn’t deserve each other, but fuck it! The thought of knowing Matteo was alive, knowing exactly where he was and pretending she didn’t made Izzy’s stomach turn. 

Eiska was right. It wasn’t her job to punish Matteo. And even if Eiska wasn’t right, she would still rather listen to her.

“I’m not going to reject him.” Izzy paused for a moment, then added. “He’s still not my brother, though.”

Eiska gave Izzy a patient smile: “Family is family.”

Behind them, the Xenosecurity man cleared his throat again, this time so loudly that Eiska couldn’t ignore him any longer. 

She turned around to glare at him and asked “What is it?”

“If you’re done discussing the redemption of terrorists,” said the man, glaring right back at Eiska with the same intensity, “I assumed you might want to know that they just pushed Commander Alves past.”

Izzy pushed herself up on her elbows so fast that she very nearly headbutted Eiska, but Eiska was too busy trying to sneak a peek through the half-open door to notice.

“Is she okay? Did she make it? Oh, heck, hold on a second!”

And she rushed out so fast she made the door bounce off the wall, leaving Izzy behind on her bed.

 

* * *

 

 

“Come right on through,” the officer said, giving Izzy a smile so condescending that she was half expecting him to pat her on the head as she passed. She briefly considered “accidentally” rolling over his toes. But when he opened the door to the small room, all of those thoughts were wiped from her mind: There he was, Matteo, dressed in a prison uniform, his right arm in a cast, his left arm chained to the table. 

When Matteo saw her, he tried to jump up, but was stopped short by the chain.

“Izzy!” he gasped, then, his eyes wide with fear, he whispered: “Ana? Is she...”

“She’s okay.”

He stared at Izzy, unblinking, his mouth slowly forming the words she had just said, as if he had to taste them to understand: “She’s … okay…”

Then his bottom lip started to quiver and before Izzy knew it, his head had dropped onto the table with a loud thump and he was babbling words that were barely comprehensible between the sobs wracking his body: “Okay … she’s okay … they didn’t tell me anything … oh god … oh god …she’s alive…”

Izzy had sworn she would take it slow, keep her distance. Matteo had helped terrorists after all and there were some ideas floating around in his head that she wanted no part of whatsoever. Besides, you couldn’t just pick up where you’d left off after one and a half decades of radio silence. But when push came to shove, she was on the other side of that table with her arms around him before she even realised what she was doing.

“It’s alright,” she whispered. “It’ll be alright, she’s recovering, it’ll all be fixed.”

He was not talking now, only sobbing uncontrollably. What was she supposed to say to him after all this time? She didn’t have her anger to rely on anymore, not with Matteo in the state he was in. His tears would have made a stone weep! 

Lost for words, she simply put her head down on his back. He didn’t move, just kept sobbing, and Izzy wasn’t even sure he had noticed her weight. But feeling his warmth on her face brought back so many memories of loneliness slowly draining away in Matteo’s arms. She couldn’t have moved, even if she had wanted to.

She wasn’t sure how long she’d been resting her head on him, but when he finally stopped crying and made to straighten up, it was far too soon. 

Matteo turned his blotchy, swollen face to Izzy and whispered, in a voice so rough it hurt just to listen to it: “I swear, I never wanted to hurt anyone. All those things you said about that box… I couldn’t just let him shoot it. I didn’t think he’d…”

Izzy grabbed Matteo’s unbroken arm and squeezed: “Listen, you did the right thing. It wasn’t your fault he hit Ana instead! And she’ll be fine! Better than fine! They’ve given her lungs a cybernetic upgrade. Just earlier today she was telling me how she’s going to take a trip to the Caribbean and try freediving once they let her out of the hospital. Well, she’ll have a lot of time now, she’s still suspended pending investigation, but I’m sure they’ll reinstate her once…”

A quiet hiccup from Matteo made Izzy fall silent and look at him - really properly look at him for the first time since she had started talking. He wasn’t listening to her rambling. He was staring straight ahead, through her rather than at her, his mouth still half open, sucking in rattling breaths. 

He dropped his head and mumbled, so quietly Izzy wasn’t sure if it had been intended for her at all: “And Raul … oh God, Raul, what did I do?”

“Raul is …” Izzy considered saying ‘fine’ but the lie tasted bitter on her tongue before she’d even spoken it, “... a bit of a mess right now. He isn’t talking - well, using his datapad, at the moment. Except to talk to Gus. You remember Gus?”

Matteo nodded slowly.

“Gus has been trying to act as an interpreter, but he’s not very good at English and Raul just plain refuses to speak anything but Versi right now.” Izzy sighed. “Well, it is practically his first language, isn’t it?”

She could see her words were finally getting a reaction, but apart from that she had no clue what was running through his head. There had been a time when they’d barely had to speak to share a thought, but that was long gone. And with a jolt Izzy remembered the hate that had poured out of Drew’s mouth just before his death and how Matteo had made it very clear that he agreed with every little bit of Drew’s bigotry. She recoiled.

“But you find all of that disgusting now, don’t you? You’d rather Raul stay silent than fraternise with the evil invaders from space.”

Matteo’s eyes widened and he gulped. Then he shook his head.

“I was,” he choked and his voice sounded so raspy that Izzy had a hard time not flinching. He paused, bit his lip, opened his mouth and closed it again, then lowered his head under the intensity of Izzy’s gaze. Finally he said: “An idiot.”

“That’s putting it rather lightly,” Izzy said.

Matteo didn’t answer.

“You know,” said Izzy, feeling a tiny flame of anger rise up inside her stomach, “Raul still thinks it’s his fault you left!”

Matteo’s head snapped up. “God, why?” he gasped.

“Because you bloody told him it was! The night you left, remember? If he hadn’t figured out how to talk to Gus, the Bureau wouldn’t have recruited us and you’d be home. That’s what you said, isn’t it? I’d be entirely unsurprised to hear Raul thinks it’s his fault you ended up here!”

“I’m … sorry. I didn’t think…”

“Yeah. Yeah, you didn’t,” snapped Izzy, but the words sounded hollow even as they left her mouth. It had been so much easier to scream at Matteo when he’d been standing amidst a bunch of xenophobic terrorists, wearing a ski mask and holding a gun. She felt downright rotten shouting at the broken mess of a man in front of her now. To make things worse, he had started crying again, not in loud, nauseating sobs like before. He was just sitting there, staring down at the table as the tears dripped softly down his cheeks onto the tabletop, forming a little pattern of droplets.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” mumbled Izzy.

“You’re right though,” Matteo said so forcefully that Izzy flinched. “I ruined your lives, just ‘cause I couldn’t fucking keep it together like you all did. It’s not like I was the only one who had to leave home. It wasn’t fair what I said … you didn’t really get a choice either. But you adapted and I,” he sniffed, “just couldn’t. I tried, I really did. And the whole time I was watching you and Raul and Ana just having the time of your lives and I was just left behind, being fucking useless.”

“You weren’t…” Izzy started, but Matteo interrupted her: “I was, though. I was too stupid to do any of the things you did. I was always lagging behind. Remember how you sometimes caught me studying when you got up to get a drink at night?”

Izzy nodded. 

“You never knew I did that nearly every night! I waited until I was sure you were all asleep and I got back up to try and make sense of - well, all of it. Do you know what it was like watching all of you just understand it all like it was no big deal, even little Raul…”

“Raul is a genius, Matteo, he always has been.”

“So is everyone else compared to me,” said Matteo forcefully. “I’m a moron.”

“That’s not true,” said Izzy, but Matteo ignored her.

“It all came so naturally to you, the stuff we were supposed to learn, interacting with aliens, all of it. You and Ana just thought it was exciting and Raul, well, you know what he was like…”

Izzy nodded.

“You know, I never stopped having nightmares about them. About Gus. About that day when we first figured out there was more than just us humans out there. About when they took us away from home.”

“I didn’t know…”

A tired smile appeared on Matteo’s face. “I didn’t want you to know. I’m good at hiding, always had to be, all my life. It just didn’t really help me much after they took us away.” He sighed. “At least back home I was good at something. So what if it was stealing and fighting and just fucking surviving and helping you survive? I was good at that, Izzy! So … so I went back.”

As Izzy looked at Matteo’s exhausted face, the echo of the slamming door and her own sobs reverberated in her head.

“But without you, I was no more use back out on the street than at the Bureau. It wasn’t home, Izzy. I thought I could just go back, but there wasn’t anything to go back to. I even tried to return to the Azevedo.” 

“We tried to look for you there…” whispered Izzy.

“I didn’t stay long,” answered Matteo. “I couldn’t. None of it was the same anymore. Half of the people living there now are aliens and the rest might as well be.”

Izzy didn’t have the energy to tell Matteo off for saying ‘aliens’ again. 

“And then I ran into Drew and he told me about how he had this great plan to give us our planet back and I thought … maybe if the aliens left, the Bureau would close and you’d come back to me.” He shook his head. “It was stupid. And I should’ve realised what he was. What he’d be willing to do…”

“So should I,” Izzy burst out, to her own surprise. “People had been complaining about him and I just ignored it. I thought he just had a bad sense of humour and I really didn’t have time to deal with that bullshit! If I’d reported him, maybe someone would’ve investigated and they would’ve stopped him. He would’ve never talked you into all of this, if I’d done my job right. You wouldn’t be here.”

“Don’t.”

But Izzy couldn’t stop herself now: “And I should’ve noticed you were struggling. What kind of fucking friend was I? I should’ve helped you. I could’ve helped you, if I hadn’t been too busy being a selfish bitch…”

“Izzy…”

“You told me when they first recruited us! You told me you were scared!”

Matteo frowned. 

“Did I?”

“Yeah, yeah, you did. The day they took us out of the Azevedo, you said you didn’t know if you could handle it.”

Matteo’s frown deepened: “Maybe I did, but, Izzy, you were twelve!”

“Oh, like any of us were still children by that point, really.”

“You were twelve and you were happy, Izzy! It wasn’t your fault I’m a fuck-up! It still isn’t!”

“You’re not a fuck-up!”

Matteo raised his unbroken arm and wiped the snot from his nose. 

“It doesn’t matter now,” he said, his voice oddly firm. “I’m going to die in here anyway.”

“Don’t say that. Your trial hasn’t…”

Matteo interrupted her: “I’m surprised they’re even giving me a trial. Honestly, I just assumed I’d disappear in some black site prison never to be seen again. Doesn’t make a difference, though, they’ll never let me out of here anyway. Don’t know why they’re bothering with the trial. I suppose it’ll be prettier for the public that way.”

“Oh bullshit, we all saw what happened! You tried to stop Drew! You saved us! Thousands, maybe millions of people would be mad or dead without you. They’re not going to lock you away for life after that! We’re not going to let them!”

Matteo snorted.

“‘We’ - yeah, right. Like Ana or Raul are going to put in a good word for me after what I did. They hate me.”

Izzy shook her head. “They missed you just as much as I did, Matteo, they don’t want to see you rot in here.”

“Sure.”

“No, I’m serious, Ana even told me to let you know that.”

Matteo raised his eyebrow. “She did, did she?”

“Well, okay, what she said was ‘Tell Matteo he’s a fucking bastard and if he doesn’t shape up by the time they let him out, I’m going to come fucking kick him into shape myself’, but…”

To Izzy’s surprise, Matteo laughed: “Yeah, that sounds like her.”

Izzy smiled. 

“Listen, Matteo,” she said, reaching over to grab his hand. “We love you. You made mistakes, yeah, but we all did.”

“You act like it’s the same thing,” said Matteo and sighed.

“Well, no, it’s not, but we’re not just going to drop you now. We’ll be here and we’ll figure something out for when they let you out. You’re not just going back to being fucking miserable, if we can help you. We’ll do better by you this time around, I promise!”

Matteo looked at Izzy. She could see him gulp once, twice. Then he opened his mouth and said: “I’m …. I …” and he reached for her hand, squeezed it tight and said: “Thank you!”

Izzy could have stayed just like that, holding his clammy hand and staring at his tear-stained face for hours, but she had barely even managed to squeeze his hand once, when the officer poked his head in the door to let her know that her time with Matteo was up. Izzy barely had the strength to pull her hand from his.

“We’ll see each other at your trial, okay? You’ll be alright!” she whispered and turned to leave. 

She was just about to leave the room when Matteo cried: “Izzy, wait!”

Izzy whirled around.

“That alien who saved my life!”

Izzy frowned: “Yeah.”

“Tell her … tell her I said thanks, okay?”

“I will,” said Izzy, as the door was closed behind her.


End file.
